Zero trust becomes the baseline

The old model was a castle and a moat: a hardened perimeter, and implicit trust for anything inside it. Remote work, cloud services, and third-party integrations dissolved the moat. There is no longer a reliable 'inside'.

Zero trust replaces location-based trust with continuous verification. Every request is authenticated and authorized on its own merits, regardless of where it originates. A service in your own network gets no more benefit of the doubt than one on the public internet.

In practice this means strong identity for both users and services, least-privilege access that is reviewed rather than granted forever, and logging that makes anomalies visible before they become incidents.

It is a shift in posture more than a product you buy. Adopted incrementally — starting with your most sensitive systems — it dramatically shrinks the blast radius when, not if, something is compromised.