The Art of Zero Trust Persuasion: How to Win Buy-In for Your Initiative

You can build a strong case for Zero Trust and outline a doable strategy for your organization. Unfortunately, somewhere between the slide deck and the budget discussion, it’s easy for the excitement to fade and for executive sponsorship to falter.

Zero Trust can be one of the hardest security strategies to win leadership buy-in for. It asks business leaders to change the way they think about security and the business’ defenses.

A 2024 study by the Ponemon Institute reported that most organizations surveyed were at the early stages of Zero Trust adoption. A lack of in-house expertise was the main cause of slow adoption.

However, the same study also noted a growing number of senior leaders who are seeing value in an enterprise-wide Zero Trust strategy.  

Changing minds has never been an easy sell, but here’s how you can take advantage of the buzz around Zero Trust to make it easier to get your project buy-in.

Translating Zero Trust into executive-ese

Security and networking teams love Zero Trust because it gives them control, clarity, and a way to stop lateral movement without much re-plumbing of the network. It means less worry and greater confidence in the network’s ability to survive an attack.

As important as these things are, they don’t often translate well to executives. Business leaders aren’t in the weeds tracking security architectures and policies. They’re thinking big picture in terms of business risk, cost impact, and brand reputation.

The problem is that we’re often speaking different languages.

When we lead with Zero Trust as the answer to our cybersecurity challenges before we’ve clearly defined the problem in business terms, we lose them. They hear new tools, big price tags, and possible slowdowns before they hear resilience and simplicity.

Don’t let this discourage you or fool you into thinking your leaders don’t care about cybersecurity. They do.  

Leadership accountability for cyber risk echoes across the global regulatory landscape. Be it the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) cyber disclosure rule or the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), executive teams and boards are legally accountable for cyber risk governance and transparency.  

They just need to see how Zero Trust supports the outcomes they already care about.

3 reasons Zero Trust buy-in stalls and how to fix them

Even when you frame Zero Trust the right way, getting leadership to fully commit can still be tricky.  

The message might land, but the momentum can fade fast once budgets, timelines, or team politics get involved.

That’s because Zero Trust buy-in doesn’t usually fail at the strategy level but at the human level. Here are three reasons that happens and how you can turn each one into an opportunity to move things forward.

1. You’re making it sound harder than it is

If your pitch starts with a multi-year roadmap and several phases of transformation, you’ve already lost the room.

Executives don’t want to be told that everything needs to change before anything works.

Instead, zoom in. Highlight some of the quick wins you can achieve with a Zero Trust approach. Show what’s achievable in the first 30, 60, or 90 days, such as:

• Segmenting critical apps
• Visualizing east-west traffic in a sensitive environment
• Identifying and shutting down high-risk traffic flows

Prove the concept first. Bring them results they can talk about in their next board meeting.

This makes Zero Trust feel real, purposeful, and productive.

2. You’re selling a framework instead of solving a problem

No one wakes up excited to adopt a new framework, especially for something as critical and complex as cybersecurity.

Your leadership team likely does wake up worried about ransomware, reputational damage, and regulatory audits.

How do you address this? Start with the reality of a network without Zero Trust:

• “Right now, we have 12,000 endpoints with a flat network access. That means a single compromised credential could reach 80% of our critical systems.”
• “Right now, we can’t tell how an attacker would move once they’re inside.”  
• “If a breach happened today, it would take us hours, maybe days, to contain it.”

Then show how Zero Trust solves that exact problem.

Pitch it as a way to finally fix the risks they’re already losing sleep over.

3. You’re waiting too long to get leadership involved

Too often, security teams build a perfect Zero Trust plan behind the scenes and only loop in leadership at the final moment with a full-blown proposal.

Surprise! That rarely goes well.  

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from Illumio customers, it’s that leadership buy-in is by far the most crucial determinant of a deployment’s success or failure.

Instead, treat executives like partners from the start. Ask early questions like:

• What’s your biggest concern if we were breached tomorrow?
• What kind of security wins do you want to show the board this year?
• Which business units would be most at risk if ransomware hit?

This makes the strategy feel co-owned and not dropped from above.

An added bonus is that when leadership helps shape the initiative, they’re much more likely to champion it when it matters.

The hardest part of Zero Trust is the trust

Getting started with Zero Trust isn’t always easy.  

It challenges assumptions, asks teams to collaborate in new ways, and removes implicit trust. It forces change from not just users and systems but from processes that used to be “good enough.”

This is why getting leadership buy-in for Zero Trust is about making trust a business priority in whatever ways speak best to your organization’s unique needs.

When you can build trust at the top, you’ll create more momentum everywhere else and make your Zero Trust project a success.