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Defender Brief: Zero Trust

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Defender Briefs are our quick summaries of important security, compliance, and regulatory topics relevant to the OT cybersecurity community, along with how Industrial Defender can support your response and readiness efforts.

Zero Trust is reshaping cybersecurity by rejecting the idea of implicit trust inside or outside the network. Every user, device, and system must be continuously verified. This model is becoming essential as threats increasingly target operational technology (OT) environments, where attackers often exploit gaps in visibility and outdated assumptions of trust.

Applying Zero Trust in OT comes with unique challenges. Legacy systems, sensitive processes, and limited network segmentation make it difficult to simply replicate IT models. This is why organizations need a practical, OT-aware approach.

In this brief, you’ll learn:

  • What Zero Trust means in an industrial context

  • How U.S. federal guidance from NIST and CISA applies to OT

  • Why asset visibility is a key barrier to Zero Trust implementation

How Industrial Defender supports Zero Trust efforts with deep OT asset data