You're reading from Zero Trust Overview and Playbook Introduction

Product typeBook

Published inOct 2023

PublisherPackt

ISBN-139781800568662

Edition1st Edition

Concepts

Network Security

Authors (2):

Mark Simos

Nikhil Kumar

View More author details

Zero Trust Playbook Roles

“Your career is your business and you are its CEO.”

– Andy Grove

Now that we have a clear picture of Zero Trust, the three pillars, and the six-stage playbook journey, let’s see how to make this real for each role—from CEOs and board members to technical analysts and engineers.

This chapter looks at the Zero Trust journey from a role-based perspective, which complements the strategic view from the six-stage plan described in the previous chapter. The combination of these perspectives brings a clear three-dimensional view of the Zero Trust journey. This also sets the stage for the rest of the playbook series, with each of the books addressing the journey for a set of related roles.

What does this mean for me?

The role-based view is critical for individual professionals, managers, and senior leaders to fully understand Zero Trust. This view provides clarity on how it impacts day-to-day work, informs...

Role-based approach

Perceptions filter what you see and change how you act in the world.

We all understand the world around us through the lens of our individual experiences, our personal identity, and the role we are playing at that moment. We see things differently when we view our role as a friend, sibling, student, teacher, boss, employee, customer, vendor, owner, auditor, or other role. This affects what we see and hear, as well as how we act in any situation.

This is also true of our work—we perceive challenges, solutions, and opportunities through the lens of our professional identity and the role(s) we play within an organization.

For this reason, the Zero Trust Playbook provides role-by-role guidance for business, technology, and security roles that are impacted by and required to support Zero Trust. Each role in the playbook has an important and unique part to play in Zero Trust, regardless of whether it is fulfilled as an occasional part-time duty, a shared...

Illustrative list of roles

This is an illustrative list of roles impacted by Zero Trust and roles with a clear part to play in the success of Zero Trust, digital, and cloud transformations.

The roles in Table 6.1 may evolve over time, but only minor limited changes are expected:

Per-role guidance

The playbook guidance helps each role navigate the transformation to Zero Trust, manage ongoing Zero Trust operations, and manage the continuous changes to come.

The volume of guidance provided for each role varies by how involved they are with Zero Trust. Security and technology roles are affected by Zero Trust in many ways, while business leaders such as CEOs, CFOs, and board members experience fewer changes (though their actions are critically important to the success of everyone else).

The guidance for each individual role provides clear guidance in these areas:

Role mission and purpose
Role creation and evolution
Key role relationships
Required skills and knowledge
Tooling and capabilities
Zero Trust impact and imperatives for each role
Playbook stage involvement for each role
Day in the life of Zero Trust for each role
Defining and measuring success

Role mission and purpose

The playbook includes a description...

Making it real

This section shows how our friends at Acme Bank (who we met in Chapter 8, Adoption with the Three-Pillar Model) formed their top priorities for their roles and teams by applying the Zero Trust Playbook Series.

Acme recognizes that Zero Trust is a long-term initiative but wants Zero Trust now! Acme is taking an agile approach where each team is getting started immediately on the top priorities while building more detailed and complete plans based on the playbooks. Acme expects the teams will have to adjust their priorities and plans as the environment changes and they learn, but they aren’t waiting to get started on Zero Trust.

Acme Bank held a Zero Trust kickoff meeting with the bank’s leadership and other leaders and stakeholders from across technology and security teams. The group discussed business and Zero Trust priorities, identifying top priorities for each team in the bank to get started on immediately. Each team is prioritizing Zero Trust...

Summary

In this chapter, we learned about the role-based approach of the playbooks in the Zero Trust Playbook Series. We reviewed why the role-based approach is important, an illustrative list of roles that are involved and affected, what guidance is provided for each role in the playbook, and how Acme Bank is making it real by planning its top priorities.

Each of the role-specific playbooks in the series is built on this foundational framework and goes much deeper—providing role-specific instructions to guide implementation through each playbook stage. Each playbook shows how to apply Zero Trust principles and reference models to each role and to different industries and organizations via the Acme examples.

Book 1 summary

This chapter closes the Zero Trust Introduction and Playbook Overview book in the Zero Trust Playbook Series.

Throughout this book, we’ve shown what Zero Trust is, why it’s important to organizations, how to structure a Zero Trust transformation, and how roles across the organization work together to implement it and make it real.

Through the chapters of this book, we learned how the Zero Trust Playbook modernizes security across your organization:

Chapter 1, Zero Trust – This Is the Way, got us started by introducing Zero Trust, the Zero Trust Playbook Series, and answering common questions about Zero Trust.
Chapter 2, Reading the Zero Trust Playbook Series, introduced us to the structure and layout of information in the playbook series and suggested strategies to get what we need from these books quickly.
Chapter 3, Zero Trust Is Security for Today’s World, showed us how Zero Trust is designed for the digital age of...

What’s next in The Zero Trust Playbook Series

It’s time to get started on execution!

As we discussed before, this Zero Trust introduction and Playbook Overview book acts as a big program's kickoff meeting with all stakeholders. This book gave us full context of what type of guidance everyone will get—now, the next step is to move on to the role-specific playbook for our individual role (and playbooks for our key colleagues as appropriate). This is like team members breaking into smaller groups in a large program to plan and execute each workstream.

Each playbook focuses on a group of related roles and describes how to execute their part of the six-stage plan. Each playbook provides three types of guidance to make this real and actionable for everyone:

Shared context: This describes the Zero Trust context that applies to all roles in the playbook. For example, the security operations playbook describes the overall function of SecOps in Zero Trust...

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Authors (2)

Mark Simos

Mark Simos helps individuals and organizations meet cybersecurity, cloud, and digital transformation goals. Mark is the Lead Cybersecurity Architect for Microsoft where he leads the development of cybersecurity reference architectures, strategies, prescriptive planning roadmaps, best practices, and other security and Zero Trust guidance. Mark also co-chairs the Zero Trust working group at The Open Group and contributes to open standards and other publications like the Zero Trust Commandments. Mark has presented at numerous conferences including Black Hat, RSA Conference, Gartner Security and Risk Management, Microsoft Ignite and BlueHat, and Financial Executives International.
Read more about Mark Simos

Nikhil Kumar

Nikhil is Founder at ApTSi with prior leadership roles at Price Waterhouse and other firms. He has led setup and implementation of Digital Transformation and enterprise security initiatives (such as PCI Compliance) and built out Security Architectures. An Engineer and Computer Scientist with a passion for biology, Nikhil is an expert in Security, Information, and Computer Architecture. Known for communicating to the board and implementing with engineers and architects, he is an MIT mentor, innovator and pioneer. Nikhil has authored numerous books, standards, and articles, and presented at conferences globally. He co-chairs The Zero Trust Working Group, a global standards initiative led by The Open Group.
Read more about Nikhil Kumar

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Role Type	Roles
Organizational Senior Leaders	Member of Board of Directors Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Chief Operating Officer (COO) Chief Legal Officer (CLO) Chief Privacy Officer (CPO) Chief Risk Officer (CRO) Product- and Business-Line Leaders Communications/Public Relations Director
Adjacent / Ancillary Roles	Human Resources Business Analysts Internal Readiness/Training Internal and External Communications...

Role Type

Roles

Organizational Senior Leaders

Member of Board of Directors

Chief Executive Officer (CEO)

Chief Financial Officer (CFO)

Chief Operating Officer (COO)

Chief Legal Officer (CLO)

Chief Privacy Officer (CPO)

Chief Risk Officer (CRO)

Product- and Business-Line Leaders

Communications/Public Relations Director

Adjacent / Ancillary Roles

Human Resources

Business Analysts

Internal Readiness/Training

Internal and External Communications...