“Zero trust has quickly moved from a security concept to an operational imperative for organizations,” the vendor noted.

The challenge is that vendors have a tendency to call everything network-as-a-service, "and it really isn't NaaS half the time," Gartner Analyst Andrew Lerner said.

Around 30% of the respondents chose zero-trust network access as the top zero-trust investment priority, Zscaler found.

"You use the word innovation incorrectly," Gartner Analyst Andrew Lerner told the networking vendors in the audience.

Almost all (96%) surveyed organizations consider security resilience crucial to their business, Cisco found in a recent report.

Secure service access encompasses secure access service edge, zero-trust network access, and extended detection and response, according to GigaOm.

Gartner argues organizations should understand what translates from IT-centric zero-trust strategy to cyber physical systems.

Windstream Director Chris Alberding said "the cost is going down" and "the ease of implementation is going up" for data loss protection.

Cisco plans to roll out Duo's passwordless technology to all of its employees by the end of this year.

As secure access service edge adoption continues across industries Gartner is seeing a particular emphasis on single-vendor strategy.

Perimeter 81 also found secure service edge is a core priority for respondents who had concerns with data privacy and cloud security.

Because SASE is still a work in progress, CIO and CISOs "need to rethink their respective roles" in supporting infrastructure operations.

Claude Mandy dove into how to navigate zero-trust deployments for on-premise, hybrid, and multi-clouds.

Competition still exists between all the “key endpoint security vendors” and hyperscalers, Dell’Oro Group's Mauricio Sanchez said.

The components for zero trust edge include secure web gateway, SD-WAN, cloud access security broker, and zero-trust network access.

One of the most critical considerations when choosing a firewall is application awareness, Fortinet's Aiden Walden said.

“Maybe it’s time. You say SD-WAN has been great, but it’s time, and you can make this switch,” AvidThink's Roy Chua said.

“In order to secure something and trust something, it needs to know what that something is," Michael Gray said.

Citizen developers are "a bit of amateurs, and they're not really trained on things like application security or data sensitivity," VP Chris Gardner said.

"Threat actors ... are luring users into clicking on phishing links in other, less expected places” than email, Ray Canzanese warned.

Zero-trust network access allows enterprises to become "cloud-first, mobile friendly, to be able to have their applications accessible over the internet.”

Gartner named Cato Networks, Cisco, Citrix, Forcepoint, Fortinet, Netskope, Palo Alto Networks, Versa Networks, and VMware as market leaders.

"In the terms of the market itself, I think that what will happen is they're all going to follow as usual," CEO Idit Levine said. "We like leading."

Gartner identified zero-trust network access as the fastest-growing segment in network security with a 36% growth in 2022, and 31% in 2023.