98 percent of UK organizations plan to use zero trust architecture

Almost all UK business leaders and IT decision makers either plan to or have already started implementing zero trust strategies at their organizations according to new research from Illumio.

The research also looks at the barriers that prevent organizations from adopting zero trust. The main technological barriers include legacy systems that can't be upgraded (29 percent) and cost constraints (22 percent).

Culturally within organisations, 33 percent of respondents say their business is resistant to change unless mandated by compliance regulations. And, weirdly, 32 percent fear that their employees would think that they don't trust them -- even though zero trust actually means the opposite.

Top reasons cited for implementing zero trust are because it was a part of a strategy refresh on security infrastructure (48 percent), or to enable the business to improve its agility through digital transformation (47 percent). In addition 60 percent say the greatest benefit is feeling more confident they had secured their critical data and reduced their organization’s risk exposure (54 percent).

"This research makes one thing clear -- UK business leaders and IT professionals know how important zero trust strategies are in making their organizations resilient, particularly as ransomware wreaks havoc across every industry," says Raghu Nandakumara, EMEA field CTO at Illumio. "It's especially encouraging to see over 90 percent of organizations prioritizing segmentation, since this is an essential control in keeping critical assets safe from attacks. Despite some technological and organizational barriers, we all need to start, or continue, making incremental progress on our zero trust plans. It's better to be slightly more secure tomorrow than to have the perfect plan on paper in two years."

The full report is available from the Illumio site.

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