Establish distinct identities
Give every workload, partner, user session, and environment a distinct identity. Prefer short-lived credentials issued from platform identity over shared static secrets. Bind tokens to intended audiences and certificates to controlled trust roots.
Keep runtime identity separate from deployment and human administration. A CI system’s ability to deploy a service should not become the service’s everyday production authority.
Enforce every viable path
Layer controls across edge gateways, service proxies, applications, and data access. A gateway knows route context; an application knows object ownership; a network control narrows reachability. None is sufficient alone for every decision.
Map direct service addresses, queues, scheduled jobs, admin tools, and failover paths. Close or explicitly govern any path that bypasses normal authentication or authorization.
Make policy explicit and current
Evaluate principal, action, resource, tenant, and relevant context. Decide which facts can travel in a token and which require current retrieval. Record policy version and decision ID.
Use caches only within a risk-appropriate freshness window, and make revocation propagation measurable. High-impact writes may need a current decision even when low-risk reads can use recent cached evidence.
Contain compromise and dependency loss
Reduce permissions, reachable services, token audiences, and credential lifetimes. Separate batch, interactive, administrative, and emergency identities so a compromise cannot inherit unrelated power.
Define secure behavior when identity, policy, key, or network services fail. Protect central controls from retry storms and test degraded modes before operators need them.
Implementation checklist
- Issue distinct user, workload, partner, and environment identities.
- Validate channel and application-layer identity evidence.
- Layer enforcement at edge, service, application, and data paths.
- Authorize action and resource, not network location.
- Measure revocation and trust-evidence freshness.
- Test dependency failures without permissive bypasses.
Frequently asked questions
Does zero trust mean removing firewalls?
No. Segmentation and network controls remain useful for containment and reachability. They should not be the sole proof that a caller is authorized.
Must every request call a central policy service?
No. Policies can be evaluated locally or with bounded caches when distribution, versioning, and freshness are controlled. The decision must still be explicit and traceable.
How does zero trust apply to partner APIs?
Use distinct partner identities, narrow scopes, explicit tenant and operation policy, strong credential lifecycle, per-request monitoring, and a tested suspension path.
