Zero Trust for Agentic Systems — trust, safety, and security for agents. @mvpzone
The Six Essentials
A team starts from zero: agents in production, no framework, an executive who wants real progress in 90 days. The comprehensive roadmap is right for the year and wrong for the quarter. The Six Essentials are the floor — a small set of practices that cover roughly 60% of the agentic Zero Trust threat surface, land in one focused sprint, and need no new infrastructure.
Phase 0 Is the Floor
Maturity models are climbing models — level 1, then 2, then 3, each phase carrying more controls than the last. That describes progress well and misses something structural: the floor, below which no operation should run, however new, small, or exploratory. Phase 0 is not the entry tier you grow out of. It is not infrastructure. It is discipline that travels with the practitioner.
What Conventional Security Got Right
There is a temptation to position conventional security as the thing being replaced — the old model is broken, the new one fixes it. That framing is wrong, and it leads to bad architecture. Conventional security is not broken; it is partial. Identity, supply chain, segmentation, incident response are all load-bearing for agents. Half the discipline — necessary, not sufficient.