Illumio’s Zero Trust Impact Assessment provides personal evaluations of a company’s zero trust maturity. The program aims to provide security and IT decision makers with data to fine-tune developments in their organization’s cybersecurity resiliency.

The assessment program result data is based on a commissioned research report between Illumio and Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), published earlier this month.

“Illumio’s Zero Trust Impact Assessment program starts by asking users a series of questions about their current Zero Trust strategy and technology investments — including what current zero trust adoption looks like within their organization, future investment plans, and use of essential zero trust technologies like Zero Trust Segmentation,” Illumio CTO and Founder PJ Kirner wrote SDxCentral via email. “Through these questions, we can determine which stage organizations are at in their Zero Trust Segmentation journeys and make custom recommendations on how they can strengthen and advance their zero trust posture.”

Once completed, organizations receive a zero trust score — either nascent, progressing, or pioneer — and can see how they stack up against thousands of peers, Kirner explained.

The growing transition from organizations’ IT environments from on-premises to hybrid environments expands attack surfaces — leaving them more vulnerable to breaches, and opens doors for attackers’ control over moving across environments and gaining unwanted access. 

A modern approach to breach containment, Zero Trust Segmentation isolates hybrid workloads and devices from unnecessary and unwanted communication to minimize the impact of breaches, and prevent them altogether.

“‘Pioneers’ fully recognize the value of Zero Trust Segmentation in any successful zero-trust strategy, and have implemented Zero Trust Segmentation across their business,” wrote Kirner. “Zero Trust Segmentation pioneers are 2.7x more likely to have highly effective attack response processes in place, are 2.1x more likely to have avoided a critical outage during an attack over the last 24 months, and save (on average) $20.1 million annually in downtime costs.”

Kirner admits that like any security project, zero trust strategies require a sufficient amount of time and money. “Teams need to get their leadership or board’s buy-in, and that requires them to be able to illustrate the value of zero trust, and specifically Zero Trust Segmentation, to their board — this assessment does just that.”