Zero Trust Isn’t a Strategy — It’s the Starting Line
“Zero Trust” sounds absolute — a world where nothing and no one is trusted.
In reality, an environment with Zero Trust is an existential contradiction – trust has to lie somewhere, and for some reason. Current Zero Trust frameworks are fundamentally flawed, and dangerously touted as the ‘end and be all’. The truth couldn’t be farther away.
Every digital environment requires some degree of trust: in systems, in machines, in human and non-human identities. Even Zero Standing Privileges – ZSP — often seen as the holy grail of Zero Trust — doesn’t eliminate trust; it simply moves trust into real-time visibility during login and session activity.
What Zero Trust Gets Right — and Why It’s Incomplete
Zero Trust emerged from a crucial observation: employees were letting hackers in.
The industry’s knee-jerk reaction was to stop trusting employees altogether — giving rise to the now-famous mantra, “Never trust, always verify.”
But breaches don’t happen because users are inherently untrustworthy.
They happen because attackers exploit even the smallest crack in user behavior or system logic.
But it is also true that a sufficiently motivated and skilled employee who can steal is very likely to at least think about it – and, under financial or personal stress, might even act on it.
So while it is far better to err on the side of not trusting than on trusting blindly, trust must still be managed intelligently.
Why “Always Verify” Isn’t Enough
“Always verify” still leaves open questions like:
- Who, what, and which systems are worth trusting more?
- When does trust matter more?
Trust isn’t a binary concept. It’s dynamic – changing with time, context, and behavior.
“Zero” implies elimination, but cybersecurity requires management and calibration, not eradication, of trust.
Trust Management in Modern Cybersec
In today’s multi-cloud, hybrid, API-heavy environments, the real question isn’t “can we remove trust?” – it’s “How can we manage it intelligently?”
That’s what Cross Identity’s Trust Management Module represents: an evolved, measurable, and policy-driven model that transforms “never trust” into “know who and what to trust, when – and by how much.”
Managed Trust involves:
- Realtime Converged User Risk Scoring – continuously evaluating each user’s cybersecurity posture, habits, and behavioral consistency – while factoring in Application and Entitlement risk scores for realistic real-time scores.
- Application Risk Scoring – identifying applications that exhibit suspicious access patterns or unaddressed vulnerabilities.
- Non-human Identity Scoring – assigning and adjusting trust to service accounts, APIs, bots, and machine identities.
- Entitlement & Access Risk Scoring – analyzing toxic combinations of rights, over-privilege, and unmonitored access chains.
- Third-party Tool Evaluation – assessing even cybersecurity tools themselves for layered accountability.
- A Unified Purpose-Built Risk Engine – providing actionable insight and small automated remediations or lockdowns based on all of the above.
Such a risk engine must be highly dynamic, policy-driven, and built on embedded cybersecurity intelligence – not on generalized AI guesswork.
It must come from a company with real cybersecurity DNA and thinking, designed to constantly evaluate and protect its environment through ongoing trust management.
When a user’s risk score falls below threshold, high-level access should be dynamically revoked.
Even repeated MFA failures can lead to temporary loss of access until accountability is established.
Cross Identity’s Gen-1 platform, Workforce Enterprise, includes the OneBrain™ Risk Engine, which satisfies these criteria.
Cross Identity’s Gen-2 platform, nimbleNova, features the Warchief® Risk Engine, with even more advanced capabilities and the same embedded cybersecurity design principles – both enabling true trust management at scale.
How Risk Scoring Works in CI’s Trust Management Heart
Risk scoring in this model provides a holistic, multidimensional view of trust, extending far beyond just login success or failure.
For example:
- It factors in access hoarding, excessive permissions, or privilege abuse.
- It also evaluates user patterns drawn from access management, such as password reset frequency, password reuse habits, and password forgetfulness – including how many times a “Forgot Password” feature has been triggered in the past, and whether the trend is increasing.
- A user is also assigned a risk modifier based on device trust: how many devices are registered to their profile and how they are enrolled – with or without conditional access.
- A single device may indicate higher inherent trust;
- five or more devices increase scrutiny and reduce trust weighting.
- It may also consider verified criminal or compliance history (if allowed in your geography).
- It tracks a Trust Relationship Score that grows over time as the employee maintains strong cybersecurity posture – e.g., an employee with three years of clean record has higher trust than one who just joined.
These are only examples, not the exhaustive list of factors that influence a user’s risk score.
The actual computation involves dozens of behavioral, environmental, and entitlement signals, each contributing to a living, contextual trust profile.
This system allows intelligent mapping and insight for decisions that must remain human – while supporting automated, instantaneous remediations where a rapid response is needed to prevent large-scale cybersecurity fallout.
Trust Management = Accountability + Intelligence
True Managed Trust Security does not rely on probabilistic AI that “guesses” risk.
It relies on embedded intelligence and policy logic – pre-defined, adaptive rules that prevent toxic combinations and risky scenarios before they can exist.
A Managed Trust environment:
- Scores users, applications, and entitlements in real time.
- Automatically prevents high-risk combinations (“toxic scenarios”) from ever forming.
- Connects security posture with accountability and incentives:
– Users with weak cybersecurity habits face friction, access limits, or administrative review.
– Users with strong posture and high trust scores can be rewarded or prioritized for streamlined workflows.
– Detects anomalies and orchestrates defensive actions through unified visibility across all modules – Access Management, IGA, PAM, CIEM, ISPM, and ITDR.
This creates a self-learning feedback loop: risk informs privilege, and privilege reshapes risk.
From Always Verify to Always Know
“Always verify, never trust” is a defensive phrase.
“Always know, always act” is a forward-thinking model.
By embedding intelligence into the identity fabric, Cross Identity’s Managed Trust Security ensures that:
- Every identity is continuously observed, evaluated, and risk-scored.
- Every entitlement and application carries a dynamic trust weight.
- Every access decision is contextual and immediate.
- Every possible toxic combination is blocked before it can form.
The Outcome: Measured, Accountable, Adaptive Security
Managed Trust Security doesn’t reject Zero Trust; it builds upon it.
Zero Trust lays the floor. Managed Trust builds the structure – with walls of context, ceilings of accountability, and windows of visibility.
Where Zero Trust ends, Managed Trust begins:
- From blanket denial to calibrated understanding
- From static verification to living accountability
- From impossible absolutes to measurable, actionable trust
Move from Zero Trust to Managed Trust
Discover how Cross Identity Workforce Enterprise and nimbleNOVA unify Access, Governance, Privilege, Threat Detection and Response, Security Posture Management, and Realtime Risk Intelligence to deliver true Managed Trust Security – built on authentic cybersecurity intelligence, from the only company with real cybersec DNA and backbone.
