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Google recently published Beyond Zero: Enterprise Security for the AI Era, alongside a blog post introducing it to the wider world. It’s positioned as the successor to BeyondCorp, and the core idea is a big one: shrink the trust boundary from the application down to the individual action on an individual resource. Instead of asking “can this identity access the finance system”, you ask “can this identity export these fifty thousand records, right now, given everything we know about them”....

Today we’re going to answer the question everybody has been asking me: when an agent takes an action, whose identity should it use? The identity an agent carries decides whether you can attribute what it did, whether it can keep working while you’re asleep, whether it survives you changing teams or leaving the company, and how much damage a stolen credential does. Get it wrong and you either can’t use agents for any real life work, or you quietly build a privilege escalation into your company’s sensitive systems....

A while back I worked with a guy named Phil. Often we’d have situations where teams would suggest bolting on security at a later stage rather than fixing the underlying problem, and he would always clap back with “you can’t bootstrap trust” and thats what I wanted to talk about today. Trust has to be end to end, if any link in the chain is weak, the whole thing collapses. You can build on a rocky foundation, but it’s going to reduce the security of the control and lead to gaps in your design that are impossible to plug....

We’ve spent the last decade building zero trust architectures. Device posture checks, tiered application access, network segmentation, conditional access policies. All designed around a core principle: don’t implicitly trust anything, verify everything, and limit the blast radius when something goes wrong. AI tools are quietly undoing a lot of that work. We’re connecting AI tools to everything, and we’re making them controllable from anywhere. That combination is a fundamental challenge to how we’ve been thinking about defense in depth....

Everyone’s shipping AI agents right now. Connect your agent to Slack, let it read your email, have it make PRs on your behalf. This can be via MCP, no-code AI tools like n8n or direct via APIs. However, we’re in this awkward middle ground where the tooling to use agents is miles ahead of the tooling to secure them. The fundamental problem isn’t new, it’s the same challenge we’ve had with any system that acts on behalf of a user, but agents amplify it in ways that existing access control patterns weren’t built for....

Over the past few weeks, my feed has been filled with a juxtaposition: security people warning about the risks of AI browsers and SF tech bros saying they have 10x’d their performance by using an AI browser to order lunch from DoorDash. A lot of people are crying about prompt injection, but that isn’t the only risk posed by AI browsers. The guidance seems to be very much “just block them” at this stage, and while that’s a pragmatic short-term solution, I don’t think it’ll work for very long....

I attended RSA this year for the first time in over a decade. What stood out to me the most was the sheer number of vendors that exist today. You can’t help but notice how many more there are than back then, with more than 600 total this year. Of course, these are only those who attend RSA, and plenty choose not to participate for various reasons. There are estimated to be around 5,000 total security vendors, but even that number likely doesn’t include the small consultancies and open source teams out there....

Absolutely nobody likes the hiring process. Not the managers hiring, not the recruitment people, and certainly not the candidates. Tech interviews are one of the worst parts of the process and are pretty much universally hated by the people taking them. We’ve all heard stories of people being asked comp sci questions about O(n) efficiency, only to connect APIs with basic middleware in their day job. I think the image below pretty much sums it up:...

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is when you hire a group of contractors from a single company to complete long-term work for you. This is typically something like customer support, where you want to outsource first-line tech support to a cheaper region or get more coverage in a timezone where you don’t have an existing presence. The problem is that zero trust architecture requires every employee accessing your critical SaaS applications to come from a managed device....

Since I posted my Security Platform Engineering blog, one of the most common questions I’ve received is: “How do I know when I should build vs. buy?” In this blog, I aim to demystify some of the decision-making around this and, ideally, help you make better decisions if you’re faced with the same problem. This is my personal view, and you might need to tailor it to your company values and risk profile, but I’ll include specific examples from my past that have had input into my decision-making....