Every once in a while, an industry term will get overused by marketing to the point of becoming a cliche. I think “Zero Trust” may have reached this threshold. In some ways, I understand why this is happening. Security perimeters have become obsolete as people use mobile devices and cloud applications to work from anywhere.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to attend two technology events IN PERSON!!! Seeing people “mask-to-mask” has been fun and educational. Forward Networks recently exhibited at Black Hat in Las Vegas and AFCEA TechNet Augusta. Obviously, security was the topic at Black Hat, but it was also top of mind for TechNet attendees, and attendees at both events stressed the need for better network behavioral insight.

The shift to remote and hybrid work at scale has created unprecedented demand for our cloud-delivered Zero Trust Network Access(ZTNA) solution, Netskope Private Access(NPA). This is no surprise.

There is the marketing of secure access service edge (SASE), and then there is the actual integration of key capabilities that provide the benefits of less complexity, consolidation, and lower cost of operations a properly implemented SASE architecture provides.

The need for “Zero Trust” today is no longer the same as what we talked about years ago when the term was first coined. Back then, businesses only had a handful of remote workers signing in to the corporate network. The common wisdom of the day dictated that you couldn’t implicitly trust the authentication of those remote users any longer because they weren’t on the company LAN and the common solution was installing two-factor authentication.

The zero trust model exists because of the volume and diversity of cyberthreats on the global landscape. Zero trust is a set of coordinated system management practices plus design principles for modern IT systems. The Biden administration’s executive order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity names zero trust as an essential component in hardening federal agencies against internal and external threats to national security.

Public sector organisations are in the middle of a massive digital transformation. Technology advances like cloud, mobile, microservices and more are transforming the public sector to help them deliver services as efficiently as commercial businesses, meet growing mission-critical demands, and keep up with market expectations and be more agile.

Zero Trust is not something you purchase. Zero Trust is a security strategy you build out using the working assumption that there are no safe network zones, no perimeters, no safe users, and no safe devices. The Spectra Alliance helps enable a Zero Trust model across the scope of six elements including applications, data, networks, infrastructure, identities, and devices.