Axis Security and industry analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) today unveiled new quantitative survey research of more than 420 IT professionals in North America focused on their organizations zero trust initiatives. The State of Zero Trust survey found the number of remote users accessing the corporate network and applications tripled year-over-year and was cited by 41% of respondents as a top contributor to their organization's cybersecurity management and operational challenges.

With two-thirds of respondents relying on legacy access solutions, such as virtual private networks (VPN) or virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), it was not surprising that 69% said application access was a primary or secondary consideration for zero trust in 2021.

"Coming into this year, we were committed to moving away from our VPN solution," according to Scott Rheins, Information Technology Security Architect. "When COVID-19 hit, it only validated this decision. With Axis, we were able to deploy immediately at scale. Agentless remote desktop access makes it so easy to grant access to remote users and the added security has been a huge benefit because of the increase in attacks targeting RDP this year. We are deriving a lot of business value from the Axis Zero Trust approach. It is fundamentally more secure and delivers a far better user experience than a VPN."

"The survey made clear that the rapid expansion of secure remote access requirements for employees and third parties was a significant operational challenge," said John Grady, ESG Research senior analyst, network security. The benefits of transitioning from legacy approaches to zero trust network access were also clear as it was perceived as the most effective of all the tools used to support zero-trust initiatives.".

"Axis Security's agentless-first approach enables rapid deployment and broad coverage for many key use cases cited by survey respondents including remote access for third-parties," said Dor Knafo, co-founder and CEO of Axis Security. The time is now to replace legacy access technologies such as VPNs, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and inline cloud access security broker (CASB) services using a single zero trust cloud platform," said Dor Knafo, co-founder and CEO of Axis Security.

To learn more about zero trust challenges and opportunities, download the full report.