Supply chain attacks accounted for 30% of breaches in the 2025 Verizon DBIR3, double the prior year. The attack model is reliable: compromise a software vendor, IT service provider, or managed security service, then use that trusted relationship to reach multiple downstream organizations simultaneously, often before anyone realizes a compromise has occurred. Hybrid cloud environments are particularly exposed because vendor and partner connections are common, and those connections often carry broader access permissions than a strict least-privilege model would grant.
The IBM 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report10, covering incidents from March 2024 through February 2025, reported average US breach costs exceeding $10 million. Organizations using AI and automation extensively in prevention workflows incurred $2.2 million less per breach. The differentiator was detection and containment speed. Teams with better visibility across their full hybrid environment caught anomalies faster and stopped breaches before they propagated across both sides of the environment.
Cloud misconfiguration remains a high-frequency entry point. No sophisticated tradecraft required. An over-permissioned API key or exposed storage bucket is discoverable by automated scanning within hours of deployment, which means the exposure window is very short but also very reliably present. Continuous posture monitoring and automated configuration auditing, both components of a mature zero trust implementation, close that window before external parties find it rather than after.
According to Grand View Research, the global zero trust security market was valued at $36.96 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $92.42 billion by 2030, a compound annual growth rate of 16.6%. North America holds the largest share. That budget trajectory reflects where enterprise security teams have concluded the risk actually sits, and where regulators have been pointing them for the past several years.
