By 2020, organizations had visibility. They were detecting anomalies. They were building behavioral baselines.
But they still had a hard problem: knowing something was risky didn’t mean knowing what to do about it.
Security teams could see threats. They could even predict compromise. But taking action safely? That was harder.
Because in connected environments, action has consequences.
Block the wrong device, and you disrupt patient care. Segment the wrong system, and you stop manufacturing. Isolate the wrong communication, and you break business-critical operations.
So the question became: how do you act without breaking the environment?
The Promise and Problem of Zero Trust
Zero Trust had become the dominant security philosophy. Trust nothing. Verify everything. Enforce least privilege.
But implementing Zero Trust at scale was still deeply manual.
Teams had to:
- map devices
- understand dependencies
- identify communication patterns
- design policies
- test them
- deploy them
- monitor for impact
And in complex environments, dependencies weren’t obvious.
This was where Zero Trust struggled.
Why Graph Intelligence Changed Everything
Connected environments aren’t just collections of devices. They’re systems of relationships.
Devices interact. Systems depend on one another. Communications form patterns. Risk flows through connections.
This is why graph intelligence became foundational.
Instead of thinking of environments as lists, teams began modeling them as graphs:
- nodes representing assets
- edges representing relationships and communications
- context embedded in connection patterns
With graph intelligence, security teams could see how everything related to everything else.
Turning Insight Into Safe Action
Graph intelligence made it possible to:
- identify risky relationships
- understand what a device impacted
- detect abnormal communication paths
- prioritize remediation based on real dependencies
- generate policies aligned to actual behavior
This is what made Zero Trust network security achievable.
Instead of manually mapping everything, teams could build a living model of their environment and enforce least privilege with confidence.
The Shift: Policy as Intelligence
By 2020, segmentation wasn’t just a firewall rule. It became a form of intelligence.
Policies were no longer based on guesses or static diagrams. They were built on real, observed relationships.
This is what allowed teams to move from detection to containment.
From visibility to orchestration.
From knowing to acting.
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