The Official Zero Trust Holiday Gift Guide

If you’re shopping for the Zero Trust strategist in your life (or you are one yourself), skip the socks and novelty mugs this year.  

Want to make them really happy? Help them build a stronger Zero Trust architecture.  

While Zero Trust is a strategy and not something you can purchase, strategies still need tools, practices, and support to become reality.  

So, if you’re wondering what to get that special Zero Trust champion in your life (or you’re angling for a little year-end budget magic), here’s my holiday gift guide for building a Zero Trust program.

1. Complete visibility: you can’t protect what you can’t see

Visibility isn’t step one of Zero Trust because it’s step always. You have to see your network’s terrain to defend it.

This holiday season, help your security team ditch the network blind spots. For a complete Zero Trust architecture, you need real-time, accurate, and comprehensive visibility across every asset, every connection, and every workload.  

2. Segmentation: the gift of control

Segmentation is what keeps bad actors from waltzing through your network like they own the place. It limits lateral movement, reduces the blast radius of an attack, and lets you enforce least-privilege access in a practical, scalable way.

No Zero Trust program is complete without segmentation, and it’s one of the most valuable gifts you can give your team.

3. Continuous monitoring: because attackers don’t take holidays

Monitoring once a quarter won’t cut it anymore, and neither will assuming your audit report from June still reflects your current risk in December.

What your Zero Trust team needs is continuous monitoring, the kind that keeps watch while they sleep, detects anomalies, and helps them respond before an attacker gets comfortable.

Continuous monitoring connects the dots between “trust nothing” and “verify everything, all the time.” You stay ready, learn from every signal, and make your environment stronger with each attempt to break it.  

It’s the path to antifragility — a system that doesn’t just hold up under pressure but improves because of it. And it’s a gift that pays off every single day.

4. Automation: time is a terrible thing to waste

If you’re building a Zero Trust wish list, automation needs to be near the top. It’s one of the most valuable gifts you can give your team, especially when it works hand-in-hand with continuous monitoring.

Monitoring and automation are like chocolate and peanut butter. They go together and improve on each other.

You need visibility into what’s happening, and you need the ability to act on it without delay. That’s how you go from watching to doing.

Automation helps you enforce policies, contain threats, and respond in real time — no waiting around for someone to log in and click a button. It reduces human error, eliminates slow manual steps, and makes your Zero Trust architecture easier to manage at scale.

Zero Trust only works when decisions happen fast and consistently. Automation makes that possible.

5. Executive sponsorship: your Zero Trust team can’t do it alone

No Zero Trust strategy succeeds without air cover from the top.  

Executive sponsorship is what makes Zero Trust part of business strategy. It helps turn security plans into funded, resourced, organization-wide initiatives.  

When executives model Zero Trust thinking, everyone else follows suit. Help your security team win with Zero Trust by supporting a board that champions Zero Trust.

6. A culture that embraces Zero Trust: an organization-wide security mindset

A true Zero Trust culture doesn’t happen by accident. It’s created, and it starts at the top.

When executives sponsor Zero Trust as a strategic priority, they create the right incentives. Those incentives drive the behaviors that make smart security decisions second nature across the organization.

That kind of culture breaks down silos. It brings together security, IT, networking, and compliance under a shared mission. And it helps turn Zero Trust from a project into a way of operating the business.

Executive sponsorship and culture are two sides of the same coin. You can’t build one without the other. And once they’re in place, you’ve got something even stronger than a policy or tool: an environment where Zero Trust can thrive.

Zero Trust stocking stuffers

It wouldn’t be Christmas without something you can actually wrap and drop into a stocking.

So if you’re looking for a physical gift, here are a few of my favorite books to give the Zero Trust strategist in your life.

Agentic AI + Zero Trust: A Guide for Business Leaders

I was honored to be able to write the forward to this book by Josh Woodruff and Michelle Savage. It’s the first that I know of that discusses the important topic of how Zero Trust can use and secure agentic AI.  

The Project Zero Trust series

Authored by my good friend George Finney, this two-book series is a great way to start your Zero Trust journey. I was also honored to be able to write forward to both books:

• Project Zero Trust: A Story About a Strategy for Aligning Security and the Business ‍
• Rise of the Machines: A Project Zero Trust Story

Think Like an Attacker

Chase Cunningham (DrZeroTrust) and I go back over 20 years. His concise but profound book will give you new insights on how attackers think and how we can respond immediately.

The book is available for free from Illumio, or you can purchase it on Amazon.

As a special holiday gift, comment on the LinkedIn newsletter, and you'll be entered into a drawing to win a  signed copy of Think Like an Attacker as a gift from Illumio and Dr Zero Trust himself.

Make it a Zero Trust new year

To build a secure, resilient organization in 2026 and beyond, you need to equip your team with the right tools, practices, and support to build Zero Trust.

Every gift on this list moves you closer to better security. Start now and be ready for whatever comes next.

Wishing you a breach-ready holiday season!