Most Zero Trust programs assume one coordinated policy layer governs data access. New survey data cited by Netskope suggests many organizations are building the opposite.

In a blog post published August 13, 2026, Netskope’s Ankur Chadda summarizes findings attributed to a Cybersecurity Insiders survey of organizations with 2,500 or more employees. According to that survey, 58% of organizations run 11 or more separate data security tools, yet only 7% describe their stack as fully unified.

Coordination is limited. Netskope reports that 60% of respondents call their approach to protecting sensitive data moderately or highly fragmented, and 23% say their tools share almost no context with one another. When something needs investigating, 45% of teams query six or more systems, and 16% query more than 10.

This fragmentation directly impacts Zero Trust maturity. Respondents named manual correlation (44%), inconsistent policy enforcement (42%), and visibility gaps between tools (40%) as the top pains. Only 9% can fully investigate nearly all sensitive-data alerts, and just 10% describe their automation as extensive.

For security architects, the takeaway is that adding tools without a coordinating enforcement layer can widen the blind spots Zero Trust is meant to close. The reported visibility figures also matter for audit readiness, since maturity models assume timely, comprehensive insight into data access and movement. Netskope reports visibility is strongest in email at 36% and weakest in AI tools at 10%, a relevant flag for teams extending controls to AI workloads.

Note that all figures are single-sourced to Netskope, a vendor with a commercial interest in consolidation.