Zero Trust

Traditional security models drew a hard line around a corporate network — anything inside the firewall was broadly trusted, anything outside was not. Zero Trust rejects that assumption, on the basis that attackers routinely get inside networks through stolen credentials, compromised devices or third-party access, and that a trusted internal network is therefore not a safe one. Instead, every request to access an application or piece of data is verified on its own merits — who is asking, from what device, in what condition, with what level of authentication — before being granted, and only the minimum access needed is given.

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) formalised Zero Trust principles in its Special Publication 800-207, and the model has since become the default architecture recommended by governments and security agencies for both cloud and on-premises environments. For smaller Caribbean organisations, adopting Zero Trust rarely means a single product purchase; it means a set of practical steps such as enforcing multi-factor authentication everywhere, granting least-privilege access, segmenting networks, and continuously verifying device health rather than trusting a device simply because it is on the office Wi-Fi.