In the intense arena of Formula 1 racing, every millisecond counts – not just on the track but also in protecting the valuable data that drives success. Williams Racing, a team that has an impressive record in F1 with nine Constructors’ Championships and seven Drivers’ Championships, recently faced a critical challenge: securing sensitive data across a global operation while maintaining the lightning-fast access their team needs to compete.

A remote workforce is a uniquely powerful thing. It allows an organization to recruit and retain the best talent for the job regardless of their ability to report to an office suite every morning. Yet, as a certain comic book uncle once informed his young nephew, with great power comes great responsibility. To meet that responsibility of providing both access and security, you need to know how to implement zero trust.

Last year, organizations all around the world collectively suffered more than 10,000 data breaches. These attacks may have exposed more than 360 million people to potential cyber threats, from identity theft to ransomware. As remote employment, cloud computing, and mobile devices become more common in the workplace, threat actors have more methods than ever to compromise legitimate accounts and steal sensitive data.

The increasing sophistication of cyber attacks, the proliferation of cloud services, and the new normal of remote work have all changed the modern cybersecurity landscape. As traditional perimeter-based approaches to security become increasingly vulnerable to these modern cyber threats, zero trust has emerged as the modern security strategy of choice. Zero trust architecture is critical for any organization seeking to improve resilience, reduce breach risk, and enhance data protection.

Zero trust has become one of modern security’s most prominent strategies. Zero trust architecture is based on the fundamental idea that every network, user, and system must be verified consistently, instead of granting trust based on past access. Although zero trust is a commonly accepted practice today, it’s important to understand the pivotal role that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) plays in defining zero trust architecture and other cybersecurity frameworks.

Whether the means of a cyber-attack are phishing, ransomware, advanced persistent threat, malware, or some combination, the target is ultimately the same: your data. So, as companies seek to implement a zero-trust approach to security, they would do well to include database protection. Interest in Zero Trust is certainly high, with nearly two-thirds (63%) of organizations worldwide having implemented a zero-trust strategy, according to a recent Gartner survey. But it is hardly all-encompassing.

In the past, an organization’s digital data was safe behind passwords, firewalls, and physical locked doors. Today, cloud computing and remote work have rendered these traditional approaches much less effective. Threat actors can launch attacks from almost any device, almost anywhere. Usernames and passwords are widely available on the dark web. To keep sensitive data safe, organizations must understand that any account — even one with the proper credentials — could be compromised.

Explore NIST-backed guidance on securing Non-Human Identities, reducing risks, and aligning with zero trust principles in cloud-native infrastructures.

Zero Trust is a network security model that dictates that no one or no system should be trusted by default and that every attempt to access a network or application is a threat. For those who are naturally trusting of others, this concept is difficult to accept. However, distrusting every entity on a network until it has been verified is imperative today.