Every security program is betting on the same assumption: once a system is connected, the problem is solved. Open a ticket, stand up a gateway, push the data through. Done.
That assumption is wrong. It is also a major reason Zero Trust programs stall.
New research my team just published puts numbers on it. The Cyber360: Defending the Digital Battlespace report, based on a survey of 500 security leaders in government, defense, and critical services across the U.S. and UK, found that 84% of government IT security leaders agree that sharing sensitive data across networks heightens their cyber risk. More than half – 53% – still rely on manual processes to move that data between systems. In 2026. With AI accelerating the pace of operations on both sides.
That is the Zero Trust gap nobody talks about. Not identity. Not endpoints. The movement of data itself.
The Threat Volume Is Rising Faster Than the Controls
Cyber360 recorded an average of 137 attempted or successful cyberattacks per week against national security organizations in 2025, up from 127 the previous year. U.S. agencies saw the weekly rate surge 25%. Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report tracks a similar trajectory on the enterprise side: third-party involvement in breaches doubled year over year, reaching 30% of all incidents. IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report put the average cost of a breach spanning multiple environments at $5.05 million, roughly $1 million more than on-premises-only incidents.
The boundaries between IT and OT, between tenants, between partner and internal environments are where the money and the dwell time sit right now.
Connectivity Is Not the Same as Secure Data Movement
The moment data crosses a boundary, whether between an OT network and the enterprise SOC, between a partner tenant and your cloud, or between classified and unclassified, it stops being a routing problem and becomes a trust problem. It has to be validated, filtered, and policy-controlled before anything downstream can act on it. That is where modern architectures slow down.
The Cyber360 data is blunt about where the pain is concentrated:
- 78% of respondents cited outdated infrastructure as a primary source of cyber vulnerability, specifically pointing to analog systems and manual processes as weak links.
- 49% named ensuring data integrity and preventing tampering in transit as their single biggest challenge when transferring information across classified or coalition networks.
- 45% flagged managing identity and authentication across multiple domains as their biggest access challenge.
Integrity in transit, identity across domains, and manual processes are still in the loop. That is a working description of the attack surface adversaries have been exploiting for three years.
The enterprise data tells the same story in a different language. Dragos’ 2025 OT Cybersecurity Report found that 75% of OT attacks now originate as IT breaches, with roughly 70% of OT systems expected to…
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