Zero Trust Playbook for Mid-Sized Companies

Why Zero Trust Matters Now Mid-sized companies have become the sweet spot for attackers: the asset footprint is large enough to generate profit yet governance budgets are still stretched thin. Zero trust offers a pragmatic way to shrink the blast radius by assuming every connection is hostile until proven otherwise. When identity, device health, and workload context sit in the same risk equation you can stop granting implicit trust to anything that lives on the inside of your network.

Building Your Control Layers Start with the identities you understand best: employees and contractors. Enforce strong authentication, conditional access, and short-lived credentials. Introduce microsegmentation at the application tier, pairing software-defined perimeters with service mesh policies. On the data layer, use attribute-based access control to tie permissions directly to business sensitivity.

Operating the Model Day-to-Day Zero trust is less a product and more a lifecycle. Instrument lateral movement telemetry, fold it into your SIEM, and feed detections back into policy tuning. Establish change management so that network and identity teams review policies together. Create runbooks for incident responders that explain how to request just-in-time access when automated policies deny legitimate work.

Key Metrics to Watch - Median time to provision or revoke access per role - Percentage of workloads isolated behind policy-driven boundaries - Rate of policy exceptions granted per sprint - Coverage of continuous device health signals across endpoints

Closing Thoughts Attackers will continue to pivot through hybrid infrastructure as long as flat networks and coarse permissions give them room to breathe. Zero trust is how you suffocate that movement. Start with identity, expand to workloads, and treat every policy review as a chance to make the next intrusion materially harder.