Zero trust supports business objectives for three personas. For the senior leadership team, ZT enables the achievement of business outcomes. For the CIO, ZT supports better control over IT costs and capacity. For the CISO, ZT supports the development of security capabilities that align to both vulnerabilities/threats and evolving business needs. By articulating and connecting these goals, businesses can ensure that ZT initiatives deliver meaningful payback.
It’s tempting to state that because every aspect of a digital business relies on secure technology, zero trust will have impact across all business objectives. But our research finds that ZT business objectives are better understood in terms of depth rather than breadth.
Zero trust has a meaningful, beneficial impact on organizational capacity to address key executive concerns: an enterprise’s ability to roll out new capabilities quickly, support major corporate transactions, and build stakeholder confidence.
ZT supports CIO objectives by reducing complexity and streamlining processes used to deploy needed business systems and can even provide a means for reducing shadow IT. CISOs need to address both senior executive and CIO imperatives and pursue a third set of goals: focusing defense on critical corporate intellectual property (IP) assets rather than on the network perimeter, maturing key practices (particularly concerning identity), and helping the security function evolve from reactive firefighter to collaborative, forward-looking business partner.
Click here to access the Stratascale Executive Guide to Zero Trust report, “Zero Trust Business Objectives”
