Zero trust drops the assumption that anything inside the network is safe. A laptop on office Wi-Fi earns no more trust than one in a hotel lobby. The model rests on three principles: verify every request using identity and context, give users and workloads only the access a task needs, and design as if an attacker is already inside.
The urgency comes from how far the perimeter has dissolved. NIST’s 2025 practice guide tested its example builds against an environment with several cloud platforms, a branch office, and employees working from coffee shop Wi-Fi. One firewall at headquarters can’t stand in front of all of that.
Enterprises have responded. In Gartner’s 2024[1] State of Zero-Trust Adoption Survey of 303 security leaders, 63% said they had fully or partially implemented a zero-trust strategy, and the model keeps spreading.
In January 2026, Gartner predicted that half of all organizations will apply zero trust to data governance by 2028[2], as unverified AI-generated data piles up. One older detail still deserves attention, though. In that same adoption survey, 56% said their main reason was that zero trust is considered industry best practice. A program started because everyone else is doing it tends to get scoped around what’s easy to deploy, rather than what’s most at risk.
