With artificial intelligence (AI) models now capable of discovering thousands of vulnerabilities in days and developing exploits in hours, organizations are moving from preventing to containing the breach. This requires enforcing least privilege across identity, secrets, network segmentation, and policy across your IT domains. Perimeter firewalls still matter, but they aren't everything. Hybrid environments, multivendor infrastructure, and lateral traffic leave network operations (NetOps) teams defending a boundary that many attackers already know how to cross.
Moving to a zero trust network means enforcing less implicit trust and more verified access, supported by security controls that scale as your IT landscape changes. Zero trust requires continuous, automated discipline at scale to counter modern security threats. By standardizing on Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, NetOps teams can integrate smart threat detection with Event-Driven Ansible. This connection helps teams deliver rapid remediation while remaining within human-defined operational guardrails. Unsure of where to begin? Explore these 5 steps to implement zero trust NetOps.
Establishing a zero trust architecture begins with a thorough inventory of your network environment. You must catalog devices, interfaces, VLANs, and configurations across multiple vendors, maintain scheduled backups, and use this data as the foundation for security decisions. Ansible Automation Platform gathers device facts, interface states, VLANs, and active configurations across disparate vendor environments.
It converts unstructured command-line interface (CLI) data into searchable, auditable, and reusable structured JSON or YAML formats, while capturing details such as OS version, device model, serial number, and system type. By turning inventory into a continuous stream rather than a one-off project, network architects gain accurate topology mapping, operators receive reliable data, and security teams establish a dependable baseline of normal behavior prior to policy enforcement.