Expanding Your Horizon: A Podcast on Business and Technology · Horizon Managed Services

Beyond the Perimeter: How Zero Trust Can Help Businesses Build a More Secure Future

·26 min·1 clip

A small business can become the stepping stone to a much larger government target.

Rob Stoner opens the conversation with Joe Malinowski about Zero Trust and the case for a more secure future. He frames it as a cybersecurity framework that requires every user and every device to be authenticated and authorized before access. Joe says the working assumption is that a breach has already occurred or will occur. That shift changes where security begins and where it ends. The firewall is no longer the edge. Joe says security reaches the user's fingertips. The discussion then turns to the move many small businesses made when employees had to work from home. It also covers cafes, vacations, and mobile devices carrying corporate data. That reality creates a need for IT and business leaders to understand what is happening on those devices. The episode then moves into regulated sectors. Healthcare comes up first. Finance and payment processing follow. Local government agencies are part of the picture too. HIPAA, PCI DSS, and Sarbanes-Oxley are named as examples of the compliance obligations that can apply. The conversation also pushes back on the idea that small organizations are too small to matter. Rob recalls a case where a small business was compromised because it was a vendor or supplier to a governmental contractor. That example makes the supply chain risk concrete. Near the end, Joe says the whole shift is a mindset change. He contrasts younger people who grew up with facial recognition, thumbprints, and multi-factor authentication with older users used to simply turning everything on. He closes by saying the world is different, but not worse, and that help is available for people sorting out the change.

As heard by us

Zero Trust is framed as a practical response to access control, compliance, and remote work.

Expanding Your Horizon presents Zero Trust as a practical answer to how work now reaches far beyond the office. Rob Stoner and Joe Malinowski lay out a model where every user and every device must be authenticated and authorized before access is granted, tying the idea to remote…

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Why you'd press play

If your office is a coffee shop, this will help make the security math feel less awkward.

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