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07/06/2026 8:33 pm
TL;DR: Zero Trust access management has moved from network perimeter thinking to identity-centric control, with Okta arguing that secure identity, continuous verification, and context-aware access are now the core starting points for hybrid work, cloud adoption, and distributed access models. That shift exposes the limits of static trust assumptions: initial authentication is not enough when sessions last for hours or days and risk changes mid-session.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by Okta: Getting Started with Zero Trust Access Management
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams implement zero trust access management across hybrid environments?
A: Start by centralizing identity, authentication, and policy decisions so access is evaluated consistently across cloud, on-prem, and SaaS resources.
Q: Why do traditional perimeter controls fail in zero trust programs?
A: Perimeter controls assume the network edge is a meaningful trust boundary, but hybrid work dissolves that boundary.
Q: What breaks when session trust is not rechecked after authentication?
A: If access is only checked once at login, a stolen device, changed location, or altered risk profile can leave an attacker inside an active session.
Practitioner guidance
- Centralize identity policy across all access surfaces Map human, workload, and partner access into one policy model so the same authorization logic applies across SaaS, on-prem, cloud, and infrastructure access.
- Add session-level re-evaluation to access controls Use risk signals from device posture, location, and anomalous behaviour to reassess access after login and terminate or step up sessions when context changes.
- Reduce standing privilege across the extended enterprise Review employee, contractor, partner, and service access together and remove broad entitlements that outlive their business need.
What's in the full article
Okta's full whitepaper covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- The staged maturity model that maps fragmented identity to unified IAM and then to continuous access enforcement.
- The specific Okta controls named in the paper, including Universal Directory, Access Gateway, Risk Engine, and FastPass.
- The partner integration examples used to connect identity policy with network, endpoint, analytics, and orchestration tooling.
- The GitLab case study showing how an all-remote organisation approached lifecycle management, onboarding, and offboarding in practice.
👉 Read Okta's whitepaper on getting started with zero trust access management →
Zero trust access management: are your identity controls keeping up?
Explore further
07/06/2026 10:29 pm
Zero Trust access management is only as strong as the identity lifecycle beneath it. A policy model that starts at authentication but cannot govern joiner, mover, and leaver states across people, services, and sessions will always leave residual trust behind. The discipline here is not just stronger sign-in, but a governed identity plane that can absorb change without creating standing access debt. Practitioners should treat lifecycle integrity as the baseline control, not an adjacent process.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 88.5% of organisations acknowledge that their non-human IAM practices lag behind or are merely on par with their human identity and access management efforts, according to the 2024 Non-Human Identity Security Report.
- Only 19.6% of security professionals express strong confidence in their organisation's ability to securely manage non-human workload identities.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What is the difference between zero trust and least privilege in access management?
A: Least privilege limits how much access an identity gets, while zero trust governs whether access should be continuously trusted at all. They work together, but they are not the same control. Zero trust needs least privilege to reduce blast radius, and least privilege needs zero trust to stay valid as context changes.
👉 Read our full editorial: Zero trust access management still starts with secure identity
