What I’m seeing in zero-trust deployments
The real story isn’t in the survey data — it’s in the conversations I’m having with enterprise security architects trying to implement zero trust strategies. Last month, I worked with a financial services company that had spent eighteen months evaluating ZTNA solutions. They’d built requirements documents, conducted vendor demos and mapped their application inventory. But when it came time to deploy, they hit a wall.
The problem wasn’t technology. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant shows vendors like Palo Alto Networks, Netskope and Zscaler have mature platforms. The problem was that implementing these solutions required untangling years of VPN configurations, documenting legacy application dependencies and coordinating with stretched application teams.
What struck me was hearing their CISO say, “We bought this ZTNA platform for intelligent, automated access control. Instead, we’re spending more time on manual policy creation than with our old VPN.” That’s when I realized we’re dealing with a deeper issue than technology selection.