Report: Orgs with zero-trust segmentation avoid 5 major cyberattacks annually

 A new report by Illumio found that organizations leveraging zero-trust segmentation avert five major cyberattacks annually, saving more than $20 million in downtime costs.

In the past two years, digital transformation has drastically expanded the attack surface. Where IT was once a walled-in, on-premises technology environment, a modern IT architecture now consists of on-prem, public and multiclouds. This surge in connectivity and growing hybrid complexity has led to a dramatic uptick in the number of vulnerable endpoints (i.e., laptops) and a widening attack surface. In fact, in the past two years alone, 76% of organizations have been the victim of a ransomware attack and 66% have experienced at least one software supply chain attack.

Most surprisingly, the report found that 47% of security leaders do not believe they will be breached — despite increasingly sophisticated and frequent attacks and rising zero-trust adoption rates (even though “assume breach” is a core principle of zero trust).

What’s more, the report uncovered that 81% of organizations agree that zero-trust segmentation plays a critical role in accelerating broader zero-trust efforts. According to ESG, organizations classified as advanced segmentation users were 2.1X more likely to have avoided a critical outage during an attack over the last 24 months. These organizations are also bolstering competitive advantages with 14 more cloud and digital transformation projects planned over the next 12 months. 

In short, the report is the latest to demonstrate that zero trust, and specifically zero-trust segmentation, are modern strategies to reduce risk and increase cyber resilience as the threat landscape continues to grow and evolve.

Illumio commissioned ESG to conduct a 1,000-person global study on the current state of Zero Trust strategies and the impact of zero-trust segmentation (ZTS), a rapidly emerging technology category and a modern approach to stop breaches from spreading across hybrid IT (from the cloud to the data center).

Read the full report by Illumio.