The Zero Trust Hub

This past October, I was standing at Bletchley Park, just outside London, looking at the machine that defeated the machine.

It was the Bombe, the analog computer Alan Turing and his team built to crack the Nazi Enigma code. The encryption was too complex and changed too quickly for humans to break by hand.  

The only way to win was to build a machine that could match the problem at its own speed.

Standing there, I was reminded why that moment has always mattered to me. The Bombe didn’t just help end a war. It shaped how I think about cybersecurity and ultimately helped inspire my vision for Zero Trust.

Because we’re facing the same challenge today. Our adversaries operate at machine speed. Their attacks are automated, scalable, and relentless. And too often, defenders are still expected to respond manually.

That realization sits at the core of Zero Trust. You can’t rely on human reaction time to stop automated threats. You must design systems that assume compromise and respond at the same speed as the attacker.

The lesson from Bletchley Park that still applies

One of the biggest mistakes organizations make is believing that smarter people, bigger teams, or more dashboards will solve modern security problems. That’s the equivalent of trying to crack Enigma with pencils and notebooks.

The reality is simple. Today’s threats are not manual. They are scripted, automated, and relentless.  

Malware propagates faster than humans can respond. Lateral movement happens in seconds. By the time someone investigates an alert, the damage is already spreading. The damage spreads faster than you can open a ticket.

That’s why Zero Trust was never meant to be a static policy exercise. From the beginning, it was about designing systems that assume attackers will use automation and building defenses that can match that speed.

Why data volume is breaking traditional security

Every system today generates massive amounts of data. Security teams are drowning in it.  

The problem isn’t a lack of information, but that humans can’t manually extract meaning from it fast enough.

At Bletchley Park, they didn’t win by collecting less data. They won by processing it differently. They used computational power to find patterns no human could reliably see.

That same principle applies to Zero Trust today. Visibility alone isn’t enough. You need the ability to analyze, enrich, and interpret data at scale.  

That’s where automation and machine learning become essential to operate at the speed of modern attacks.

Zero Trust is about controlling speed, not just access

A lot of people still talk about Zero Trust as if it’s primarily about identity or authentication. Those things matter, but they miss the larger point.

Zero Trust is about controlling how systems behave when something goes wrong.

Most networks have holes created by bad policy that allows attackers to get inside the network. The real question is what happens next. Can they move freely? Can they spread? Can they escalate?

This is where automation becomes non-negotiable. You can’t rely on manual response to stop lateral movement. By the time a human clicks a button, the attacker has already moved again.  

Zero Trust requires enforcement mechanisms that operate continuously, automatically, and locally.

Humans and machines can win together

One of the most important lessons from Bletchley Park is that this was never humans versus machines. It was humans working with machines.

The creativity, intuition, and strategic thinking came from people. The raw processing power came from computers. Together, they created something neither could do alone.

That same synergy is what modern Zero Trust demands.  

Humans define intent and decide what “good” looks like. Machines execute that intent at scale, without fatigue or delay.

When we talk about AI and automation in Zero Trust, this is what we mean. Not replacing people but empowering them to operate at machine speed.

Designing Zero Trust for a world of automated adversaries

The machine defeated the machine because humans understood their limits and designed around them.

Zero Trust requires the same humility. You can’t scale human reaction time to match automated threats. But you can design architectures that don’t rely on reaction at all.

The future of cybersecurity belongs to organizations that design Zero Trust strategies combining human intent with computational enforcement.

That’s how you win against automated adversaries and how you contain breaches. It’s also how you build security that actually holds up when it matters most.

We need to learn a lesson from Alan Turing and “build the machine that defeats the machine.”