Zero Trust Networking Gains Ground Amid Pandemic: Pulse Secure

A Pulse Secure study reveals that the global health crisis furthered zero trust implementations in enterprise network environments. The survey finds 60% of organizations have accelerated their Zero Trust projects during the pandemic, and only 15% have slowed down.

Through the first six months of the pandemic, security vendors successfully put forward a narrative about elevating security and pitched zero trust as the panacea for all underlying security issues dogging organizations with legacy infrastructure. As traditional corporate perimeter defenses morphed into cloud and edge computing, organizations optimized their investments to address the new normal of a hybrid, flexible workplace and leaned into zero trust networking to drive end-to-end visibility, adaptive threat response and administration ease.

A new reportOpens a new window Enterprise Zero Trust Networking Strategies: Secure Remote Access and Network Segmentation, from Pulse Secure finds the COVID-19 furthered zero trust implementations in enterprise network environments.  San Jose-headquartered cybersecurity vendor Pulse Secure shows 60% of organizations have accelerated their Zero Trust projects during the pandemic, and only 15% have slowed down the implementation.

Although zero trust networking has been touted for several years, it earned a mainstream status this year when a  vast majority of enterprises saw an increase in incidents related to phishing and identity theft and grappled with insecure connections and endpoints.

Talking about the accelerated uptake of zero trust technology, Scott Gordon, Chief Marketing Officer at Pulse Secure said, “As businesses have added capacity to support remote office accessibility, they have had to cope with amplified security threats stemming from the increased use of personal computing, home offices, public networks and cloud applications. To mitigate ongoing unauthorized access, malware and data breach risks, organizations are accelerating the coordination of security controls that enable the Zero Trust tenets of user and device, as well as the application of condition access based on continuous risk assessment.”

See Also: Future-Proofing Home Offices With Zero Trust Security

However, zero trust implementations are also beset with challenges. Cross-team skills gaps (33%), lack of tools/processes to facilitate collaboration (31%), and budget conflicts (31%) are the top three challenges to Zero Trust-related collaboration and project execution between network and security teams.

Some of the other challenges include: 

• Disagreement about what technology to use (24%)
• Disagreement about ownership/administration of Zero Trust solutions (23%)
• Disagreement about goals and objectives for Zero Trust (21%)
• Cultural resistance/distrust (20%)
• Poor leadership or support from executive management (16%)

Therefore, it is crucial that organizations build a roadmap and plan beforehand. As Gordon puts it,  when it comes to Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), organizations need to consider the extent to which their applications and services can and will be moved to the cloud.

In the rush to remote work, organizations made a sizable investment in VPN and VDI solutions based on the knowledge that the technology would work well with their hybrid IT infrastructure. However, before bringing about zero trust networking in the enterprise environment, IT needs to consider whether the technology will support existing applications within security ecosystems.

“Ideally, the most pragmatic approach would be to seek ZTNA solutions that can coexist with other secure access investments, providing greater deployment flexibility as enterprises migrate applications to the private and public cloud and adopt edge-based services to address workplace flexibility and digital business requirements,” Gordon told Toolbox.

The survey also finds that 62% of organizations that were successful in implementing Zero Trust preferred a Zero Trust taskforce consisting of network and security experts. Of the total, half (50%) of organizations have a dedicated taskforce, 45% had formally established collaboration between security and networking personnel, while only 4% collaborated on an ad hoc basis.

In addition, enterprises that have a defined Zero Trust initiative (61%) with an added budget are more likely to achieve success. Meanwhile, only one-third (29%) of organizations that took an ad hoc approach to Zero Trust found success with Zero Trust networking. Shamus McGillicuddyOpens a new window , Vice President of Research at Enterprise Management Associates, said, “The survey shows that organizations that move forward with formal initiatives and budget are more likely to achieve implementation success and operational gain.”

Before deploying Zero Trust Network Access solutions, organizations need to consider these critical questions. What applications and use cases are not supported or will require workarounds, including those that are legacy or latency sensitive?  As an organization moves to cloud-delivered security, to what extent will their current hybrid IT infrastructure, services and locations be supported? Additionally, IT leaders also need to weigh in on the application access and data protection obligations that need to be met before implementing ZTNA.

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