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How Zero Trust Was Born
John Kindervag, creator of the Zero Trust model, joins host Doug Merritt on In Progress to trace Zero Trust's origin story — from LAN parties and firewall configurations to federal security mandates. John explains how getting fired for adding outbound rules to firewalls eventually led him to develop the framework at Forrester Research. The two dig into why trust is a vulnerability, how to protect what matters most, and why better policy — not more products — is the real fix.
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Key Summary
- Trust is a human emotion, not a network concept — and treating it as one creates the vulnerabilities attackers exploit.
- Focus on "protect surfaces," not everything at once. Defend your most critical assets individually, and Zero Trust becomes incremental and non-disruptive.
- All bad things happen inside of an allow rule. If something bad happened, a policy somewhere permitted it.
- Stop buying products and start building policy. One consistent policy construct — who, what, when, where, why, and how — can apply across your entire environment.
- Security won't improve until CEOs change how cybersecurity is incentivized. CISOs need real authority, not just accountability when things go wrong.
The Speaker
Doug Merritt is Chairman, Chief Executive Officer, and President of Aviatrix. Most recently, Doug served as Splunk President and CEO from 2015 to 2021. During his tenure as CEO, Doug led the transformation of Splunk from an on premise, perpetual license software company with the equivalent of $220 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), to a cloud-based SaaS company with ARR of $3.12 billion. In his first year at Splunk, Doug served as the Senior Vice President of Splunk’s go-to-market functions including sales, marketing, support, business development, partners, and other customer facing functions.
Doug Merritt
The Guest
John Kindervag is one of the world's foremost cybersecurity experts and the creator of the Zero Trust model. As Chief Evangelist at Illumio, he drives awareness and adoption of Zero Trust Segmentation. Previously, John led cybersecurity strategy as SVP at On2IT, served as Field CTO at Palo Alto Networks, and spent over eight years as VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. In 2021, he was named to the President's NSTAC Zero Trust Sub-Committee and was a primary author of the NSTAC Zero Trust report delivered to the President. He also received CISO Magazine's Cybersecurity Person of the Year award and advises organizations including the Cloud Security Alliance and NightDragon.
John Kindervag
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