Most small businesses aren’t breached because they have no security at all. They’re breached because a single stolen password becomes a master key to everything else.That’s the flaw in the old “castle-and-moat” model. Once someone gets past the perimeter, they can often move through the environment with far fewer restrictions than they should.And today, with cloud apps, remote work, shared links, and BYOD, the “perimeter” isn’t even a clearly defined boundary anymore.Zero-trust architecture for small businesses represents the shift that breaks that chain reaction. It’s an approach that treats every access request as potentially risky and requires verification every time.What Is Zero-Trust Architecture?Zero Trust is a model that moves defenses away from “static, network-based perimeters.” Instead, it focuses on “users, assets, and resources.” It also “assumes there is no implicit trust granted to assets or user accounts” based only on network location or ownership.Microsoft sets the idea down into a
