Nine out of ten security leaders agree Zero Trust is key to strengthening their organization’s overall security posture. But agreeing on the importance of Zero Trust is only the beginning – implementation is where most teams get stuck.
To help guide adoption, cybersecurity authorities like the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have released comprehensive Zero Trust models outlining critical pillars, maturity stages, and capabilities needed to reduce risk and build cyber resilience.
The real issue? Even with detailed guide maps, most organizations view Zero Trust as a daunting journey – a destination that can only be reached at the end of a long, linear trek.
In this blog, we’ll break down the most important Zero Trust pillars according to IT and security professionals and share tips for strengthening those core principles with modern innovations that remove long-standing barriers, making it faster and easier than ever to operationalize Zero Trust where it matters most.
What is Zero Trust Security?
Zero Trust security flips the traditional "trust but verify" model on its head. Instead of assuming internal network traffic is safe, Zero Trust demands continuous verification of identity, device health, and access permissions before granting users or systems access to resources. Every connection, every access request, and every session must be scrutinized, regardless of origin.
In today's landscape of sprawling assets and evolving threats, Zero Trust is more relevant than ever – but it’s not a new concept. According to Dr. Chase Cunningham, aka Dr. Zero Trust, “We've been talking about ZT conceptually for over 100 years. If you think about cyber specifically, I'd say we've been talking about it for probably about the last 15. So, it's only taken about a century and 15 years to catch up and get to where we are.”
Building a Zero Trust Architecture
Achieving Zero Trust security requires constructing a network architecture underpinned by Zero Trust principles across identity, device, network, application, and data security layers. This transformation represents an operational mindset backed by the right controls, processes, and automation.
Zero Trust Pillars: Cybersecurity Frameworks
Following the 2021 Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity (EO 14028), federal agencies and cybersecurity leaders released foundational Zero Trust frameworks. Importantly, there’s no one right way to implement Zero Trust, so different Zero Trust models simply offer alternate perspectives and paths toward a common destination.
Two of the most influential frameworks come from CISA and NSA. These models share an underlying Zero Trust philosophy, but they differ slightly in structure and emphasis.
CISA Zero Trust Maturity Model
The CISA Zero Trust Maturity Model (ZTMM) outlines a phased roadmap to Zero Trust adoption based on five pillars:
- Identity: Verifying users, service accounts, and non-human entities
- Devices: Maintaining visibility into asset health and status
- Networks: Implementing segmentation and secure communication
- Applications and Workloads: Securing apps and services against exploitation
- Data: Ensuring that sensitive data is properly protected and access-controlled
Maturity progresses from Traditional to Optimal with goal posts along the way, helping organizations assess and improve their Zero Trust posture incrementally in the context of these five core security principles.
NSA Zero Trust Architecture Blueprint
The NSA Zero Trust Reference Architecture provides a blueprint for building a Zero Trust environment underpinned by seven pillars:
- User: Continuous authentication, assessment, and monitoring of user activity
- Device: Evaluating the health and trustworthiness of devices
- Applications and Workloads: Securing applications, containers, and VMs
- Data: Tagging, securing, encrypting, and governing access to sensitive data
- Network and Environment: Segmenting and isolating environments to restrict lateral movement
- Automation and Orchestration: Enabling adaptive, automated security responses
- Visibility and Analytics: Monitoring behaviors and analyzing telemetry to improve detection and response
Like CISA, the NSA also provides maturity guidance within each pillar, specifically detailing how capabilities progress from traditional practices to advanced Zero Trust implementations.
Combined Zero Trust Guidelines
While the CISA Zero Trust Maturity Model and the NSA Zero Trust Reference Architecture differ in articulation, they converge on key principles:
- Identity-first security: Both models emphasize that verifying users and enforcing least privilege access is the first line of defense.
- Device health and trust: Visibility into device security posture is critical before granting network access.
- Network segmentation: Both models recognize that isolating systems, users, and data through advanced network segmentation is essential for containing breaches and preventing lateral movement.
- Data-centric protections: Ensuring that sensitive data is properly classified, encrypted, and access-controlled is a foundational concept across both frameworks.
- Continuous monitoring and adaptive policies: Visibility, telemetry, analytics, and automated responses are integral to achieving dynamic, resilient Zero Trust environments.
So, while CISA provides a phased maturity roadmap and NSA offers a detailed architectural blueprint, their common guidance is clear: secure identities, devices, networks, applications, and data through continuous verification, granular access controls, and tightly segmented environments.
Key Pillars of Zero Trust: Security Leader Insights
The growing consensus across security professionals is undeniable: Zero Trust is no longer just a theoretical framework or long-term aspiration; it's a necessity for modern cyber resilience.
Today's networks are more distributed – and harder to secure – than ever, and attackers know how to exploit this complexity. Organizations that want to stay ahead must operationalize Zero Trust principles not just in theory, but across every layer of their infrastructure.
According to more than 260 IT and cybersecurity leaders, the NSA 7-pillar Zero Trust model is valuable for accelerating Zero Trust initiatives – but some pillars are more important than others:
- Data is the most critical pillar, rated "extremely important" by 60% of security professionals and “very important” by another 29%.
- Network & Environment follows closely, rated "extremely important" by 53% of respondents and “very important” by 36%.
These insights confirm that protecting sensitive data and hardening network environments are the cornerstones of effective Zero Trust strategies.
Data: Enforcing Access Control
The NSA's Data pillar stresses securing information through encryption, tagging, and strict access policies. CISA also prioritizes data-centric protections, urging organizations to label, monitor, and tightly control data access.
To achieve Advanced maturity within the Data pillar, organizations are expected to:
- Implement pervasive data discovery and classification solutions
- Encrypt sensitive data at rest, in transit, and in use
- Continuously monitor access to sensitive data and apply dynamic, risk-based access controls
- Enforce strict, least-privilege access based on user, device, and contextual factors
- Use automated tools to tag and track sensitive data across environments
Ultimately, these steps ensure that data protections are not static but adaptive to changing risk conditions and network infrastructures. To that end, strengthening data protections through identity segmentation is also critical: by tightly controlling who or what can access sensitive data, organizations can directly enforce Zero Trust data access principles in real time.
In any Zero Trust model, least privilege is non-negotiable for strengthening data-related pillars; users and systems should only access the exact data needed for their tasks – nothing more.
Network & Environment: Isolating Critical Assets
The NSA's Network & Environment pillar emphasizes segmenting, isolating, and controlling network resources to prevent unauthorized lateral movement. Holistic network segmentation is critical for reducing attack surfaces and enforcing granular access controls.
At the Advanced maturity stage for the Network & Environment pillar, organizations must:
- Implement comprehensive microsegmentation across their environments, including IT, OT, and cloud assets.
- Apply granular, dynamic access controls that adjust based on real-time contextual risk assessments.
- Enforce strict segmentation of critical assets and sensitive environments with policy-driven automation.
- Continuously monitor for anomalous lateral movement attempts and automatically restrict or block suspicious behaviors.
- Ensure remote and third-party access is segmented and constrained through least-privilege principles and continuous verification.
Similarly, the CISA Zero Trust Maturity Model highlights network segmentation as a foundational capability for mitigating unauthorized access and lateral movement. In both models, segmentation evolves beyond traditional perimeter defenses toward dynamic, granular control of network communications.
Zero Trust and Microsegmentation: Strengthening Key Pillars
Microsegmentation is one of the fastest, most effective ways to strengthen the Zero Trust pillars security leaders rank as most critical:
- Data: Microsegmentation restricts data access to what assets and identities require for their role or function, enforcing least privilege access across the network.
- Network and Environment: Microsegmentation isolates every asset in secure zones that limit lateral movement, ensuring that even if attackers breach the perimeter, their access is immediately contained.
With a direct impact on core Zero Trust principles, it’s clear why nearly 70% of security leaders say microsegmentation is “very important" or "absolutely essential" for achieving Zero Trust. However, only 5% are microsegmenting their networks today.
What’s driving the disconnect? The same legacy challenges that led the NSA to classify microsegmentation as an advanced strategy – something to implement only after completing preliminary steps like rough segmentation to reach a higher level of Zero Trust sophistication. Traditional microsegmentation solutions were complex, manual, and disruptive, but modern advancements have changed that.
How Modern Microsegmentation Accelerates Zero Trust
Next-gen microsegmentation solutions – driven by automation, agentless architectures, adaptive policy enforcement, and integrated identity access controls – have dismantled legacy barriers.
Organizations no longer need to spend years implementing coarse segmentation strategies first. Today, they can achieve precise, dynamic segmentation from the outset, accelerating their path to a resilient Zero Trust architecture. As Benny Lakunishok, CEO and Co-Founder of Zero Networks points out, “Let's say there is a universe that [microsegmentation] is done in a click – that you click, learn, and it's segmented without doing anything … If you do that first, you don’t care about rough segmentation. Everything is now isolated.”
Zero Trust Segmentation: Layered Security Strategies
Advancing Zero Trust security requires layering multiple complementary approaches to uphold Zero Trust principles across every area of the network. Both the CISA and NSA models provide guidance that highlights the importance of strengthening access control, network isolation, and adaptive authentication across critical pillars, all of which can be supported by a few key strategies:
- Microsegmentation: By enforcing granular segmentation across IT, OT, IoT, on-prem, and cloud environments, microsegmentation directly supports key Zero Trust principles related to the network and environment.
- Identity Segmentation: Ensuring users, service accounts, and devices are governed by least privilege access based on verified attributes, identity segmentation directly enforces data access controls to support Data and Identity Zero Trust pillars.
- Network Layer MFA: Though traditional MFA is difficult to apply to non-SaaS assets, network layer MFA enforces just-in-time verification for all ports, protocols, and applications, aligning with Zero Trust requirements for networks and identities.
Together, these layered strategies operationalize Zero Trust principles across the most critical security tenets, rapidly moving organizations from basic practices to adaptive Zero Trust environments.
Build Zero Trust Pillars in a Click
Zero Networks transforms the dream of Zero Trust into reality. By combining effortless microsegmentation, identity segmentation, and network-layer MFA, Zero Networks enables organizations to:
- Rapidly segment and secure every asset without operational disruption
- Automatically enforce least privilege access with adaptive policies
- Contain breaches instantly and eliminate lateral movement
- Accelerate compliance and resilience without increasing complexity
Zero Trust doesn’t have to be a long, arduous journey – with Zero Networks, you can build key Zero Trust pillars in a click. Take a self-guided product tour to see how.