Zero Trust Market to Hit $85B by 2030 as Identity Spending Leads Enterprise Budgets

Identity Controls Drive Three-Quarters of Zero Trust Growth

The global Zero Trust Architecture market will grow from $28.99 billion in 2023 to $85.45 billion by 2030, according to new figures from Coherent Market Insights. More telling than the headline growth: identity and access management is the leading component segment, meaning IAM platforms are capturing the largest share of enterprise zero trust budgets.

This changes the competitive calculus. Zero trust is structurally an identity market, not a network security market. IAM vendors — Microsoft Entra, Okta, Ping Identity, CyberArk — sit on the budget line that drives the majority of spend. Traditional firewall and network security vendors must integrate with enterprise IAM stacks to compete, rather than treating identity as an adjacent concern.

For enterprise buyers, the implication is direct: boards will scrutinize identity posture first. Multi-factor authentication coverage, privileged access controls, and service account governance are now the opening questions in zero trust program reviews, not endpoint or network segmentation.

Federal Deadlines Create De Facto Enterprise Standards

U.S. federal zero trust mandates continue to shape commercial enterprise architecture, even when buyers have no government contracts. Executive Order 14028, issued in May 2021, required all federal civilian agencies to adopt zero trust. The Department of Energy followed with a Zero Trust Architecture Implementation Order covering all national laboratories, including explicit compliance deadlines.

The result: NIST SP 800-207 and the CISA Zero Trust Maturity Model have become the reference architectures that enterprises copy into RFPs. Vendors that cannot map their products to these frameworks face elimination in early evaluation rounds, particularly in regulated industries that pattern-match federal compliance models.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory's implementation illustrates the operational translation: deny by default, verify every identity, validate every device, and intelligently limit access to every resource. This is not abstract guidance. Federal programs force vendors to demonstrate specific controls across identity, device, network, application, and data pillars as separate, measurable capabilities.

What It Means for Budget and Vendor Strategy

A market expanding from $29 billion to $85 billion over seven years justifies multi-year program funding as mainstream rather than discretionary. CISOs can use these numbers to secure budget for identity modernization, micro-segmentation, and zero trust network access rollouts across multiple planning cycles.

The IAM-led spending pattern creates a decision fork: platform consolidation or composable architecture. Buyers choosing a single-vendor platform — Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, Zscaler — accept tighter integration at the cost of flexibility and exit risk. Buyers assembling best-of-breed components — independent IAM, separate ZTNA, standalone micro-segmentation — retain optionality but assume integration and orchestration overhead.

Neither choice is wrong, but the market forecast suggests there is still room for specialist zero trust vendors to grow without being absorbed by hyperscalers. Zscaler, Netskope, Illumio, Elisity, and Aembit can justify their roadmaps with an $85 billion addressable market by 2030, even as Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks push platform strategies.

What to Watch

Vendor M&A activity will accelerate as IAM platforms acquire network and endpoint capabilities to capture more of the zero trust budget. Conversely, network security vendors will continue acquiring or building IAM features to defend their position. Buyers should evaluate integration and exit costs explicitly when choosing between platform and composable strategies.

RFP language is converging on NIST SP 800-207 and CISA Zero Trust Maturity Model alignment. Vendors that cannot produce defensible architecture diagrams mapping to these frameworks will face earlier elimination in enterprise evaluations, even outside regulated industries.

Identity posture — MFA coverage, privileged access, workload identity, service account controls — will receive disproportionate scrutiny in board-level security reviews. If your zero trust program does not start with identity, expect questions about why you are out of step with where the market is allocating budget.