Zero Trust Security Adoption Rises

The increase of remote work the past two years forced IT teams to find ways to protect business networks as bad actors of cyberattacks saw a golden opportunity. Knowing this, few IT teams took the initiative to adopt zero trust security or secure access service edge (SASE), within those networks, but adoption of these security solutions is growing

Telecommunications market research and consulting firm TeleGeography, in its latest WAN Manager Survey, revealed that 35% of WAN managers implemented one or more elements of zero trust security and SASE on at least some of their company’s networks in 2021, up from 8% in 2019.

Zero trust security will help ensure network trust and thwart possible attacks while providing secure application access for employees. The strategy behind zero trust security is to never trust and always verify. SASE is a cloud-native security technology that converges WAN and network security into one cloud service model, providing consistent data protection.

“With many companies making remote work a permanent structure, we expect zero trust adoption to continue to grow,” said Greg Bryan, senior manager at TeleGeography. “Cloud adoption and local internet breakouts have also been long-standing drivers of zero trust, in addition to SD-WAN.”

All survey respondents who adopted zero trust security had multi-factor authentication in place. Other popular zero trust security policies implemented by respondents include single sign-on, remote user and device access policies, and privileged access management. 

“It’s worth noting that, as adoption grows, we’re seeing the knowledge gap narrow. Just 8% of respondents were unfamiliar with zero trust in 2021, compared to one in five in 2019,” said Bryan. “Without a doubt, zero trust has not just progressed in awareness, but in adoption.”