• Identities, not systems, are the new security perimeter for any digital business, with 81% of breaches involving weak, default or stolen passwords.
• 53% of enterprises feel they are more susceptible to threats since 2015.
• 51% of enterprises suffered at least one breach in the past 12 months and malicious insider incidents increased 11% year-over-year.

These and many other fascinating insights are from SecurIT: the Zero Trust Summit for CIOs and CISOs held last month in San Francisco, CA. CIO and CSO produced the event that included informative discussions and panels on how enterprises are adopting Next-Gen Access (NGA) and enabling Zero Trust Security (ZTS). What made the event noteworthy were the insights gained from presentations and panels where senior IT executives from Akamai, Centrify, Cisco, Cylance, EdgeWise, Fortinet, Intel, Live Nation Entertainment and YapStone shared their key insights and lessons learned from implementing Zero Trust Security.

Zero Trust is a recognized framework developed by Forrester Research in collaboration with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and also promoted by Google as BeyondCorp. Zero Trust Security is predicated on the concept that an organization doesn’t trust anything inside or outside its boundaries and instead verifies anything and everything before granting access. The approach works because today’s leading attack vector is weak or compromised credentials according to Verizon’s 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report.

Key takeaways from the Zero Trust Summit include the following:

Identities, not systems, are the new security perimeter for any digital business, with 81% of breaches involving weak, default or stolen passwords

Tom Kemp, Co-Founder, and CEO, Centrify, provided key insights into the current state of enterprise IT security and how existing methods aren’t scaling completely enough to protect every application, endpoint, and infrastructure of any digital business. He illustrated how $86B was spent on cybersecurity, yet a stunning 66% of companies were still breached. Companies targeted for breaches averaged five or more separate breaches already. The following graphic underscores how identities are the new enterprise perimeter, making NGA and ZTS a must-have for any digital business.

53% of enterprises feel they are more susceptible to threats since 2015

Chase Cunningham’s presentation, Zero Trust and Why Does It Matter, provided insights into the threat landscape and a thorough definition of ZTX, which is the application of a Zero Trust framework to an enterprise. Dr. Cunningham is a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research serving security and risk professionals. Forrester found the percentage of enterprises who feel they are more susceptible to threats nearly doubled in two years, jumping from 28% in 2015 to 53% in 2017. Dr. Cunningham provided examples of how breaches have immediate financial implications on the market value of any business with specific focus on the Equifax breach.

Presented by Dr. Cunningham during SecurIT: the Zero Trust Summit for CIOs and CISOs

51% of enterprises suffered at least one breach in the past 12 months and malicious insider incidents increased 11% year-over-year

43% of confirmed breaches in the last 12 months are from an external attack, 24% from internal attacks, 17% are from third-party incidents and 16% from lost or stolen assets. Consistent with Verizon’s 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report use of privileged credential access is a leading cause of breaches today.

Presented by Dr. Cunningham during SecurIT: the Zero Trust Summit for CIOs and CISOs

One of Zero Trust Security’s innate strengths is the ability to flex and protect the perimeter of any growing digital business at the individual level, encompassing workforce, customers, and distributors

Akamai, Cisco, EdgeWise, Fortinet, Intel, Live Nation Entertainment and YapStone each provided examples of how their organizations are relying on NGA to enable ZTS enterprise-wide. Every speaker provided examples of how ZTS delivers several key benefits including the following: First, ZTS reduces the time to breach detection and improves visibility throughout a network. Second, organizations provided examples of how ZTS is reducing capital and operational expenses for security, in addition to reducing the scope and cost of compliance initiatives. All companies presenting at the conference provided examples of how ZTS is enabling greater data awareness and insight, eliminating inter-silo finger-pointing over security responsibilities and for several, enabling digital business transformation. Every organization is also seeing ZTS thwart the exfiltration and destruction of their data.

Conclusion

The SecurIT: the Zero Trust Summit for CIOs and CISOs event encapsulated the latest advances in how NGA is enabling ZTS by having enterprises who are adopting the framework share their insights and lessons learned. It’s fascinating to see how Akamai, Cisco, Intel, Live Nation Entertainment, YapStone, and others are tailoring ZTS to their specific customer-driven goals. Each also shared their plans for growth and how security in general and NGA and ZTS specifically are protecting customer and company data to ensure growth continues, uninterrupted.