The Zero Trust Six-Stage Plan

Vision without execution is just dreaming. Execution without vision is just chaos.

Now that we have a clear picture of Zero Trust and the three-pillar model that integrates it into your organization, let’s map out the journey in more detail.

In this chapter, you will learn about the six-stage plan the playbooks use to guide the planning and rollout of Zero Trust to the whole organization. These stages enable you to build, sustain, and continuously improve Zero Trust.

These stages help you avoid common causes of project failure by ensuring all the right stakeholders in the organization are involved at the right time and have the right context to make decisions. This helps avoid waste and confusion that result from not having critical context (or from being overwhelmed with too much irrelevant detail). The six-stage plan provides a central reference point that enables people to clearly understand what will be done, why it needs to be done...

Overview of the six-stage plan

Now, it’s time to lay out the stages that are used throughout the playbooks. These stages guide the end-to-end implementation of Zero Trust, much like a building project plan helps plan the order of executing tasks (for example, pouring concrete foundations first, then framing the building, then the electrical wiring and plumbing, and so on).

The six-stage process establishes a solid foundation of Zero Trust based on proven architectures that are also tailored to your organization’s unique needs and business operating model. The process also enables you to involve the right stakeholders across the organization, ensuring you have diverse internal perspectives involved to sidestep avoidable challenges and common miscommunications. This inclusive approach carefully balances standard approaches and your unique organizational needs to set you up for success with Zero Trust.

Figure 9.1 shows the six stages overlaid over the playbook components...

The playbook stages in detail

The following tables explain the steps in each stage and who owns and drives them. These tables provide a detailed view of the end-to-end journey. The playbooks resolve these into role-specific details and guidance to provide full clarity for each role. Chapter 10, Zero Trust Playbook Roles, provides an illustrative reference for these roles and the guidance that is provided for each role.

Stage 1 – Establish a strategy

The first stage sets you up for overall success – defining a clear vision and direction, laying out the plan and prioritized roadmap to achieve it, and getting buy-in from senior stakeholders across the organization. This ensures everyone is moving in the same direction so that different teams aren’t working against each other.

Here are the steps in this stage:

1. Develop a Zero Trust vision.
2. Understand the business capabilities.
3. Understand the technical capabilities.
4. Finalize the Zero Trust...

Summary

In this chapter, we learned about the six-stage process to building Zero Trust that will be used throughout the playbooks.

We covered the detailed steps of the playbook, who leads each, and who they need to work with throughout the organization. This six-stage process enables you to take Zero Trust from a conceptual state to fully implemented and operational, reducing your organizational risk and enabling operational success.

Next up is the final chapter of this book, Chapter 10, Zero Trust Playbook Roles, where we’ll look at the Zero Trust journey from a role-based perspective.