Overcoming Zero Trust Visibility and Monitoring Challenges

29 Mar 2025 - joe

Executive Summary

The most pressing challenge confronting CISOs today is not simply deploying security monitoring solutions but ensuring these solutions deliver measurable, effective results. In the context of Zero Trust, comprehensive security monitoring must not only be implemented but leveraged optimally to meet the organization’s security objectives. CISOs must bridge the gap between comprehensiveness and effectiveness, proving that their monitoring strategies do more than merely collect data; they must yield actionable insights and drive proactive, risk-reducing decisions. This report addresses the challenge of effectively executing a comprehensive security monitoring strategy, the consequences of not leveraging solutions effectively, and what CISOs must do to overcome the challenge. How security executives measure the effectiveness of comprehensive security monitoring in Zero Trust environments.

Comprehensive security monitoring is now in place; what’s next?

As part of Forrester’s definition of modern Zero Trust core principles, comprehensive security monitoring is implemented and essential to continuously monitor and assess every user, device, or application attempting to access organization resources. (Holmes, 2024) Yet, an organization can have Zero Trust with comprehensive security monitoring but fail to leverage it effectively. When implementing visibility and monitoring comprehensively, as part of Zero Trust, organizations must “log all the things”—it’s thorough, all-encompassing, and nothing is left out. However, comprehensiveness is about scope, while effectiveness is about impact, referring to how well the implementation delivers the desired outcome or goal. CISOs are deeply involved in building bridges between people, processes, and technology and are responsible for ensuring that security is leveraged effectively across all these domains. Effective Zero Trust visibility and monitoring bridges the gap between the comprehensive tools and effective processes that empower people, guaranteeing that any comprehensive security monitoring strategy is executed in a manner that is effective in achieving the desired outcomes. The difficulty emerges due to the following:

• Complexity across diverse environments. Zero Trust environments are dynamic, microsegmented, and include multiple, often unrelated, components that operate across various locations and platforms and rapidly change or evolve over time. According to Forrester’s research data, these complex environments present a significant challenge for security decision-makers. (Blankenship, IT Environment Complexity Was The Top Security Challenge In 2023, 2024)

• Contextual understanding and coordination are missing between pockets of Zero Trust. Organizations are incorporating elements of Zero Trust in pockets. However, these undertakings lack coordination, which is indicative of department divisions hindering the effectiveness of Zero Trust monitoring and visibility. (Blankenship, Holmes, Cevoli, Holloway, & Belden, 2024)

• The Security Operations Center (SOC) needs help to keep pace. The SOC is the central nervous system to visibility and monitoring, but “Most SOCs struggle with their fundamental mission: Detection and Response.” (Mellen, 2023) Forrester’s research indicates that current staff are overwhelmed by day-to-day tactical activities, and security decision-makers identify a need for more technical skills.

The consequences of not effectively leveraging comprehensive monitoring solutions are severe. They include staff burnout, increased security risks, and data breaches due to a lack of visibility. These can lead to financial losses, reputational damage, regulatory fines, and potential legal repercussions for the organization. Moreover, they can erode customer, partner, and employee trust, ultimately affecting business performance and competitiveness.

CISOs: Prove Your Mastery in Harnessing Comprehensive Security Monitoring

The demand for effectiveness is paramount, and a Zero Trust strategy without effective monitoring is like a car driving at night with the headlights off; it is dangerously blind to what’s coming. For CISOs to demonstrate that they effectively leverage comprehensive security monitoring, they must show a clear, measurable impact on their organization’s security posture. It starts with clarifying the “Comprehensive vs. Effective.”

• Comprehensive security monitoring does not inherently translate to effective security outcomes. In addition to establishing KPIs, OKRs, metrics, and evaluations, CISOs must assign responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed people to integrate solutions into coherent, action-oriented processes. For example, comprehensive monitoring must pinpoint anomalous behaviors and connect those anomalies to specific risks tied to particular users, devices, or critical business systems. Then, the CISO achieves effectiveness when appointing a Zero Trust Program Manager (ZTPM) responsible and accountable for evaluating the effectiveness of continuous monitoring mechanisms and detecting and responding to these security incidents. (Rivera, 2024)

• Overcome the complexity of diverse environments with coordination and contextual understanding. Context matters when acquiring visibility to and monitoring complex Zero Trust environments effectively. It’s not enough to monitor everything; the CISO must monitor with intention and correlate data across heterogeneous sources to gain clarity on the actual risk landscape. For example, a CISO can overcome complexity by coordinating with the appointed Zero Trust Program Manager to apply contextual knowledge to security monitoring and transform these diverse, siloed data streams from pockets of Zero Trust into a meaningful, unified, and actionable threat landscape with insights that address specific risks.

• Empower the SOC with actionable intelligence. The CISO prioritizes the right threats, ensures the SOC isn’t overburdened, and actions based on actionable context happen precisely when needed, ultimately creating a fortified and adaptable security posture. Still, effectiveness is only realized when these actions fundamentally enhance the capability of the SOC. Many SOCs today, as noted by (Mellen, 2023), are struggling under operational fatigue, drowning in alarms, and reactive drudgery without forward visibility. Comprehensive monitoring alone increases the burden, while effective monitoring should alleviate the burden, not exacerbate it, by streamlining detection and expediting the response, effectively eliminating blind spots for the SOC. A CISO can demonstrate effectiveness by deploying monitoring technologies that automate first-tier filtering of incidents, scoring threats in real time, and pushing forward the truly critical alarms to human analysts. An example of this would be a SOC dashboard that pinpoints risky insider movements before they pivot into lateral attacks, allowing analysts to intervene proactively. This scalability of insight, powered by effective leveraging of tools, separates high-performing SOCs from overwhelmed ones.

Measuring Effectiveness of Comprehensive Security Monitoring

CISOs can prove efficacy by demonstrating that comprehensive monitoring drives a measurable improvement in security posture, mitigates risks, enhances SOC efficiency, and continuously adapts to an evolving threat landscape, ultimately protecting the organization’s core business operations. Success is not in checking a compliance box but in delivering real-time, actionable insights that secure the organization’s assets and reputation in a relentless threat environment. Demonstrating effectiveness is essential, and CISOs must be able to present metrics clearly and understandably to stakeholders, highlighting the value and importance of the security measures in place. This effort helps maintain stakeholders’ trust and confidence and ensures allocating necessary resources to support and enhance the organization’s security posture. CISOs must have a firm grasp of the metrics involved and how to evaluate them. These metrics can include various key performance indicators (KPIs), such as the number of security incidents detected, the time taken to respond to these incidents, the effectiveness of the response, and the overall reduction in security risks over time. By regularly monitoring and analyzing these metrics, CISOs can ensure that their security monitoring strategy is equally effective and comprehensive while continually improving. The subsequent text recaps methods for evaluating the effectiveness of comprehensive security monitoring:

• Threat Detection and Response Time

  • Metric: Measure how quickly the monitoring tools detect threats and how fast the system can respond to mitigate or isolate them.

  • Evaluation: A highly effective monitoring solution will have a fast Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR) against threats. Reducing these times is a critical indicator of the system’s effectiveness.

• Context-Aware Threat Identification

  • Metric: Evaluate how well the monitoring solution contextualizes threats based on device posture, workloads, user identity, network behavior, and transactional risk.

  • Evaluation: Effective monitoring should differentiate between genuine threats and benign activities by dynamically analyzing contextual data, resulting in fewer false positives and accurate threat identification.

• Coverage Across the Entire Environment

  • Metric: Track the addition and removal of assets and entities and their related attributes. Create a feedback loop that continuously assesses whether the security monitoring solution provides complete visibility across all environments (e.g., cloud, on-premises, hybrid).

  • Evaluation: Maintain up-to-date asset inventory and appoint a Zero Trust Program Manager responsible for shining a spotlight into every corner of the organization, including across all applications, endpoints, and networks—gaps in monitoring coverage signal inefficiency.

• Real-Time Monitoring and Alerts

  • Metric: Assess the system’s ability to provide real-time alerts and ensure that someone from the security team is responsible for acting on them immediately.

  • Evaluation: Real-time alerts should be fast but also informative and actionable, improving the security team’s ability to prevent or mitigate attacks rapidly.

• Automation and Orchestration

  • Metric: Check how the monitoring system utilizes automation to detect, respond to, and remediate threats without manual intervention. Metrics indicating the percentage of automated incident remediation can reflect progress.

  • Evaluation: Well-automated systems reduce the human burden, speed up responses, and decrease vulnerability windows.

• Reduction in Security Incidents

  • Metric: Track the reduction of security breaches or incidents over time.

  • Evaluation: When comprehensive monitoring is effective, there should be a significant reduction in breaches, data loss, and unauthorized access over time, demonstrating its success in stopping or isolating threats before they escalate.

• User Behavior Monitoring and Anomaly Detection

  • Metric: Measure how well the solution monitors user behavior to detect anomalies or unusual patterns that could signify a breach or malicious activity.

  • Evaluation: A reliable system can identify anomalous behavior (e.g., unusual login times, access to unusual data) and proactively flag such behavior for further investigation or automatic response.

• Integration With Incident Response

  • Metric: Review the integration of monitoring with incident response systems and how quickly detected threats are escalated or remediated.

  • Evaluation: Effective systems will seamlessly integrate with incident response, ensuring immediate action when a security breach or anomaly is flagged.

• Compliance With Regulatory Standards

  • Metric: Verify readiness for meeting regulatory requirements (such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA) through security monitoring capabilities.

  • Evaluation: Effective monitoring should help pinpoint concerns related to data privacy regulations and provide reporting that simplifies compliance audits and reviews.

• User Feedback and Training

  • Metric: Collect feedback from internal teams to assess ease of use and understanding of monitoring outputs.

  • Evaluation: If security teams are overwhelmed or confused by the outputs or false positives generated by monitoring tools, this can reduce the overall effectiveness, making periodic user feedback an essential component.

The strategy isn’t just theoretically sound; it is pragmatic, grounded in measurable outcomes, and directly responsive to the most pressing operational challenge. When implemented with rigor and adaptability, it provides CISOs with a practical and sustainable framework to not just oversee Zero Trust environments but to prove their effectiveness and maintain robust and resilient security environments. By regularly reviewing these metrics and adapting your monitoring approach accordingly, you’ll be in a solid position to evaluate and improve the effectiveness of your comprehensive security monitoring solution in a Zero Trust environment.

Works Cited

Blankenship, J. (2024, April 10). IT Environment Complexity Was The Top Security Challenge In 2023.

Blankenship, J., Holmes, D., Cevoli, K., Holloway, L., & Belden, M. (2024, September 5). Zero Trust Everywhere Is The Security Model Of The Future.

Holmes, D. (2024, April 22). The Definition of Modern Zero Trust.

Mellen, A. (2023, June 26). How To Build A Leading Detection And Response Engineering Practice.

Rivera, C. (2024, July 12). Role Profile: Zero Trust Program Manager.