Zero trust begins with a kind of uncomfortable admission: the network is no longer a safe boundary. For years, security was built around the idea that once you were “inside,” you were mostly trusted. Firewalls guarded the perimeter, and anything beyond that line operated with fewer questions asked. That model made sense when systems were centralized and users sat in predictable locations. It doesn’t hold up anymore. Work happens across cloud platforms, personal devices, remote connections, third-party integrations—there isn’t a clean inside or outside anymore, just a constantly shifting surface of interactions.