How to Make Zero Trust Actually Work
Cyro Cyber’s CEO, Shannon Simpson, recently sat down with Business Age Magazine to cut through the noise and jargon and answer the real question of how to make Zero Trust truly work.
Full article below:
Cybersecurity loves its buzzwords. We’ve all heard them “AI-driven threat detection”, “next-gen firewalls,” and now the big one everyone’s talking about: Zero Trust.
However, unlike most hype cycles, this one actually matters. The days when attackers politely knocked at your network perimeter and waited for your firewall to say hello? Long gone. Today, it’s: trust nothing, verify everything, all the time. That’s the heart of Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA), and it’s changing the way organisations think about security from the ground up.
Zero Trust isn’t about paranoia, it’s about realism. It assumes no user, device, or system (inside or outside your organisation) gets a free pass. Every access request is checked, validated, and re-checked. Identity? Device health? Behaviour? Location? All part of the equation.
Zero Trust also isn’t a magic product you buy off the shelf (as the vendors would have you believe). It’s not about ripping out your entire infrastructure or spending the GDP of a small country. What it really needs is thoughtful planning; a security model that fits how businesses operate today: cloud-first, hybrid, distributed, and interconnected.
Where Most Organisations Get Stuck
The uncomfortable truth is most environments weren’t built with Zero Trust in mind. They grew organically; a patchwork of legacy systems, cloud workloads, VPNs, firewalls, and temporary permissions that somehow became permanent.
So when leaders say, “we want Zero Trust,” they quickly hit a wall of questions:
What’s talking to what? Who actually needs access? Where’s the sensitive data hiding? And how many exceptions are lurking in the shadows?
This is where projects stall, or succeed, depending on whether you have the right guide.
Embrace a Practical Zero Trust Journey
What organisations don’t need at this point is a flashy slide deck, a generic maturity score, and advice like “rebuild your entire network.” That’s not Zero Trust, that’s chaos.
What you do need is an assessment and implementation that’s grounded, methodical, and, most importantly, realistic. Firms need to dive into the actual environment, actual risks, and actual workloads. You also need engineers with serious credentials like TOGAF, SABSA, CREST, not just digital badges, who can combine industry frameworks, technical analysis, and hands-on engineering to build a ZTA model that works for your business.
Make it Structured, but not Overwhelming
To make Zero Trust actually work, you need to break down adoption into clear, manageable phases. There should be enough structure to keep executives confident, but the flexibility to handle the quirks of your environment.
Here’s the jargon free journey:
Discovery & Assessment: The Reality Check: Map your architecture, talk to stakeholders, identify the real crown jewels (not the theoretical ones), and benchmark against NIST and UK NCSC guidance. This will give you a brutally honest maturity assessment, vulnerability heatmaps, and a gap analysis, with no sugar-coating.
Strategic Design & Roadmap: From Insight to Action: This is where Zero Trust becomes a plan. You need to define protection surfaces and segmentation, build identity control strategies, and prioritise quick wins over long-term goals. This will give you a blueprint that’s actually implementable; not a 200-page PDF destined for a drawer.
Implementation & Configuration: Actual Delivery: You now need to configure and deploy identity policies, conditional access, device compliance, segmentation, WAFs, SIEM, SOAR. This needs to be phased, not rip and replace. Plus, you’ll need testing, validation, and knowledge transfer so your team isn’t left in the dark.
Testing & Validation: Proving It Works: Architecture only becomes resilience with testing. Here you’ll need red/blue team simulations, segmentation tests and identity attack scenarios. This is where you make sure the controls do what they’re supposed to.
Handover & Ongoing Support: Because Zero Trust Isn’t ‘Set and Forget’: For teams that don’t want policy drift keeping them up at night, this is gold. It’ll involve documentation, training, and optional managed monitoring.
Zero Trust isn’t a product. It’s not a checkbox. It’s a journey; a messy, transformative one that touches identity, networks, devices, applications, data, and human behaviour. It’s an evolution and you’ll need partners experienced in identity, data, human behaviour etc. to make it actually work. There’s a lot of Zero Trust noise, but to be properly secure, organisations need to embrace the mission.
Further reading: How to Make Zero Trust Actually Work
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