Reflecting on This Year's Forrester Wave for Zero Trust

Last year after a briefing with an analyst from Forrester, we were encouraged to participate in Forrester’s Zero Trust Wave. Who were we to decline? For those of you who are not familiar, Forrester is the analyst firm that has been espousing Zero Trust as a security philosophy. Of note – Zero Trust is a proactive security strategy, rather than a detection-based strategy.

As defined in Forrester’s ZTX framework, there are multiple key components of a Zero Trust security strategy, including:

• Network 
• People
• Devices
• Data 
• Workload

With automation and visibility/analytics to tie it all together. 

Making the journey

In my mind, Zero Trust is both a philosophy and a journey.

The philosophy is “deny all" and only allow that which should be allowed. This is not a simple transition. I get to travel the world to meet with security professionals. I have not encountered the perfect Zero Trust customer, but I am encountering a multitude of customers that have embraced a Zero Trust philosophy.

However, there isn’t a Zero Trust light switch that you can buy from any vendor. It is a journey to achieve Zero Trust, and I frequently talk to customers about how to take that journey — and how Illumio fits into their overall strategy.

Zero Trust Wave highlights

This year Illumio came out with the top product offering in Forrester Research’s Zero Trust Wave report. While some other vendors required multiple products, Illumio only offered a single product. So how did we do it?

First off – Forrester highlighted segmentation as a "critical capability for Zero Trust solutions" in the report, adding: "...there’s now no excuse not to enable microsegmentation for any company or infrastructure." And we couldn't agree more.

Our product, the Adaptive Security Platform^®, fits naturally into multiple tenets of Zero Trust. The same SKU we entered last year is the same SKU that we entered this year. However, it isn’t necessarily the same product. Since last year we have released new features along with container segmentation, which allowed us to move past other vendors in current product offering.

Philosophically, Illumio has always been about enabling our customers to use more of what they already have – meaning we are programming their existing host firewalls, switches, and load balancers. That also means that customers shouldn’t have to buy more infrastructure to attain Zero Trust. And they don’t have to redesign their infrastructure to get there. 

Another item that changed since last year is the number of other vendors that are integrating with the Illumio API. While many customers use our intuitive user interface, many customers drive Illumio solely from our API. You can read our API documentation here. We're proud to have received the highest scores in both ease of use and APIs. 

To learn more about how Illumio can help you on your Zero Trust journey:

• Watch Beyond the Hype: Conversations on Mobilizing Zero Trust – with Forrester Principal Analyst, Chase Cunningham, and Illumio CTO and co-founder, PJ Kirner.
• Check out our Zero Trust solution page.
• Read our customer story featuring Ixom, a chemical industry market leader in Australia and New Zealand whoenforced Zero Trust segmentation across the data center, brownfield applications, and Azure.