A Cultural, Procedural, and Organizational Shift to Zero Trust
Zero Trust( ZT) architectures influence all industry and federal government systems today. However, many executives, technical leaders, and managers somehow perceive ZT solely as a technological challenge within budget and business risk concerns. Instead, as found out from active ZT delivery over the last five years, these beliefs are far from the truth as successful deployment of ZT relies on an equal combination of focus on people, processes, and technology. This paper offers an approach for effective ZT implementation, highlighting the importance of developing and guiding the skills and knowledge among personnel, as well as establishing the necessary processes within the System Development Lifecycle for systems development through experience, recommendations, lessons learned and best practices. Annex A offers some practical lessons learned.
1 INTRODUCTION
History has shown maneuvering the pitfalls of technology innovative transformation successfully takes years, not months. This innovation truth outcome has been learned over and over from the very beginning and throughout the Information Age with the introduction of the computer innovation and availability. Although partially part of Moore’ s Law, technology transformation attributes focus more on the forgotten aspects in technology delivery where new process development and updating human knowledge potentially impact more than the overall costs of the technology solution alone and could have more dire consequences. The industry will typically use common system engineering( SE) best practices to emphasize learning from experience through lessons learned and best practices to understand what worked well, any improvements, and any benefits to future projects.
ZT is yet another prime opportunity for innovative technology transformation that offers many new cybersecurity protections from the continuing pacing threat. With focus on innovating and enhancing cybersecurity defense in depth, ZT builds security by providing continuous verification of users and devices regardless of location or relationship within the architecture. Another high technical innovative solution, the industry understands that ZT is the next technology to enhance cybersecurity. It also seems the industry is forgetting the past history found in lessons learned and best practices where the human aspects of education and creating of newer processes are just as important as the actual technology delivery itself. Thus the industry continues to forget there are technical, human and processes in equal share that also make transformation successful.
ZT and other technical transformations always become part of and impact the organization, but many times become‘ hot topic of the day’ or‘ today’ s emergency.’ This is the same for ZT becoming the buzzword of the day without full knowledge of how to implement correctly and the true organizational impact. Mitigating the typical human resistance alone is one of the toughest fundamental impacts of change where ZT is no different. Transformation of any kind should involve better and open communication that includes repeated granular level sharing of
96 May 2025