“Never trust, always verify” has become a slogan, but underneath it is a genuine change of default: the answer to “should this request be allowed?” starts as no.
Why the perimeter stopped working
Remote work, contractors, cloud services and connected plants mean there is no single trusted inside. In an industrial group, a compromised office credential must never become a path into operational technology.
Three principles in practice
- Identity is the perimeter: every user and service is authenticated and authorized on its own merits, not by where it sits on the network.
- Access is scoped, not standing: people and systems get what their role needs, for as long as they need it.
- Verification is continuous: device health, location and behavior are checked throughout the session, not only at login.
Segmenting OT from IT
Segmentation between IT and OT, brokered access for vendors and monitoring that understands industrial protocols turn policy into reality. Without them, a Zero Trust statement is only an aspiration.
An honest roadmap
Zero Trust is a multi-year shift, not a product: identity governance first, then segmentation, then continuous monitoring. Organizations that treat it as a checklist buy the tooling and skip the harder work of redesigning access.