70% of security professionals would change how cybersecurity works

A poll conducted by SentryBay, the UK-based cybersecurity software company has found that 69.1% of professionals with security responsibility believe a rethink is needed to deal with the threat of cybersecurity now that devices and applications have moved outside the corporate network.

The poll, which was conducted on Twitter amongst cybersecurity professionals, aimed to assess attitudes to cyber threats and methods of protecting vulnerable devices. It found that 58.3% of respondents believed that a zero-trust approach to security was essential, and 19.9% thought it was important. When asked if their organisation had adopted zero-trust, however, only a third (33.6%) said they had.

One barrier might be the difficulties that companies are experiencing in implementing BYOD models, for which zero trust is the recommended approach to securing corporate perimeters. Over a third (33.5%) said that adopting BYOD was too complicated. The role of enterprise users has also been a BYOD challenge with user privacy concerns being cited by 28.1% of respondents and user engagement/friction cited by 19.9%. Management overheads were a challenge for 19.9%.

The poll indicates that while 47.7% of organisations have still not adopted zero-trust, 8.5% are already in the process and 10.6% plan to do so in 2022. The appetite for a change in cybersecurity methods and practices as devices and applications move away from physical offices and controlled networks is clearly important to almost 70% of those working in security, but this does not mean that it is always easy to achieve.