“Just make us Zero Trust.” Hands up if you’ve ever heard some version of this statement. Gather ten cybersecurity pros in a room, and you’ll have ten frustrated people trying to implement Zero Trust Security Architecture (ZTA). Although boards and non-security executives often understand the ZTA security model at a high level and love the idea of an inherently secure network, security teams keep running into walls during implementation.

Bad news first. Implementing Zero Trust is more complex than using a particular service or a product. Although definitions vary, Zero Trust is an approach to network architecture that moves security closer to user actions and away from network assets. In a 100% Zero Trust environment, no user, process or application inside a network is trusted by default.

What size Zero Trust would you like? Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA), and cybersecurity in general, would be easier if you could walk into a Zero Trust shop instead of navigating a human and technological minefield featuring confused executives, reluctant employees, and a buzzword-heavy Zero Trust vendor landscape. The fact that “humans don’t work in a Zero Trust manner” will not change anytime soon, but technology is something in your control.

A typical security operations centre (SOC) has three core costs: People, data and tools. The total cost of these will vary dramatically based on factors like how many endpoints and users are in your environment and the number of SOC team members you need. Various SOC cost calculators available online put the cost of building a SOC for a 1000-user environment at upwards of £2 million per annum.

If you had to choose a security measure that would make the most difference to your cyber program right now, what would it be? Maybe you’d like to get another person on your team? Someone who is a skilled analyst, happy to do routine work and incredibly reliable. Or perhaps you’d prefer an investment that would give your existing team members back more of their time without compromising your ability to find and fix threats? What about human intelligence without human limitations?

Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) alerts are what happens when an EDR system decides that event data from an agent installed on an endpoint, or several endpoints, shows a potential threat. This doesn’t mean that every EDR alert is a malicious event in progress. Many are “false positives” or malicious behaviour that is actually not a threat.