Project Zero Trust

A Story About a Strategy for Aligning Security and the Business

By: George Finney, John Kindervag - foreword

Narrated by: Daniel Thomas May

Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins

Publisher's summary

Implement Zero Trust initiatives efficiently and effectively

In Project Zero Trust: A Story About a Strategy for Aligning Security and the Business, George Finney, chief security officer at Southern Methodist University, delivers an insightful and practical discussion of Zero Trust implementation. Presented in the form of a fictional narrative involving a breach at a company, the book tracks the actions of the company's new IT security director.

Listeners will learn John Kindervag's 5-Step methodology for implementing Zero Trust, the four Zero Trust design principles, and how to limit the impact of a breach. They'll also find:

• Concrete strategies for aligning your security practices with the business
• Common myths and pitfalls when implementing Zero Trust and how to implement it in a cloud environment
• Strategies for preventing breaches that encourage efficiency and cost reduction in your company's security practices

Project Zero Trust is an ideal resource for aspiring technology professionals, as well as experienced IT leaders, network engineers, system admins, and project managers who are interested in or expected to implement zero trust initiatives.

©2022 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (P)2022 Ascent Audio

Zero Trust is not just a marketing term.. who knew?

I am an IT security professional and thought zero trust was just a generic marketing term - this fictional story of a company implementing zero trust in their environment goes a long way in helping others understand what it is and what it isn’t. The key part is zero trust has to be tailored to each organization and follow certain principles… best IT security book I’ve heard in a long time.

Amazing book on ZT

It's a fantastic book on the concept of Zero Trust. George is a master storyteller. It's an exciting book complete with business and technical perspectives. Striking a perfect balance between the two is hard to achieve, and George has done it with a swagger!

Excellent for understanding zero trust concepts

Zero Trust can be a complicated concept to wrap your head around. Project Zero Trust puts things in perspective by taking you through a journey of implementing zero trust at a fictional company. Throughout the book, you'll learn not just the concepts of zero trust but also how those concepts interact with real-world scenarios.

This one will be a classic

Cybersecurity aside, this is just a great story. It’s written in a style similar to The E-myth, another good story coupled short and dense takeaways.
It almost feels like I went through an internship at MarchFit, and I’m much more confident with both selling the idea and leading the implementation of Zero Trust.

This is a must hear/read

Probably one of the most critical listening audiobooks I came accross the last 1-2 years. The story is amazing though I would prefer multiple narrators to create a better atmosphere of the conversations. Nevertheless the scenario can easily being a carbon copy of real world. I think this will be a classic and I hope for a future title 2.0. The book/eBook/audobook should be a must for reference on any security practitioner.

I'd prefer to read this one

Kudo's to the George and John! Great story that covers all the bases in real-world scenarios.
However, as more characters are developed the audio version starts to become like nails on a chalkboard because some of the voices are so incongruent with the characters.

The Unicorn Project, but for security.

Similar to "The Phoenix Project" although not as good, like "The Unicorn Project" the hard challenges are not described well enough - the characters goes through the implementation of Zero Trust a bit too easily.
Authorization and authentication is only briefly discussed despite being central to the concepts.

Amazing

Wonderful read, very educational and engaging, which is not easy to do! Highly recommended for anyone interested in cybersecurity

Zero Trust Example Implementation

I enjoyed listening to this book and examples given on implementing Zero Trust. The concept of Zero Trust seemed confusing on the surface. However, after reading this book, my takeaway is Zero Trust focuses on breaking down internal network trust relationships and implementing stricter security controls and observability for internal communications.

Content is fine, voicing is comically bad

Using a fictional narrative to walk a team through learning and implementing zero trust is entertaining and well written. Information is conveyed efficiently with enough spaced repetition to have it sink in.

The performance however is awful. Each character in the story comes across as a caricature. It distracts from the story and adds nothing of value. It became so bad after a couple of hours that I had to shut it down.

I'll finish the story by reading the book.