Amid industry confusion over many aspects of ZTNA the non-profit expects to consolidate and accelerate research and training to boost adoption.

Due to prevalent confusion and lack of awareness about Zero Trust principles, much needs to be done to correct the situation amid the burgeoning cyber threat landscape.

One not-for-profit organization dedicated to defining standards, certifications and best practices to help ensure a secure cloud computing environment—the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA)—has on 9 March 2022 announced the launch of its Zero Trust Advancement Center to do just that.

The center brings together several existing research and educational projects at CSA that will be disseminated online and through its global network of chapters. According to its CEO, Jim Reavis: “CSA’s large community has made it known that there is a lot of confusion about Zero Trust. Many IT and security executives, as well as the rank and file, report that they do not have access to quality education that explains Zero Trust in a vendor-agnostic setting, frames it as a set of guiding principles, and helps provide context around the myriad of related solutions.”

Therefore, in the next 18 months, the Zero Trust Advancement Center will offer courses in Zero Trust architecture and strategy; a webinar series;, several research whitepapers; an annual Zero Trust Summit to be initiated in Q4 2022, and a new professional credential, the Certificate of Zero Trust Knowledge (CZTK). CSA will also release the results of a survey on CISOs’ perspectives about deploying Zero Trust on 6 June 2022 at the RSA Conference.

The Zero Trust Advancement Center builds upon several existing CSA projects, including the Software-Defined Perimeter research series, Cloud Controls Matrix, Enterprise Architecture and other related virtualized security models. Organizations can register their interest and participate in the program by navigating to cloudsecurityalliance.org/ZT.

This initiative is being made possible by three firms: CrowdStrike, Okta, and Zscaler, which share the perspectives of CSA, and expect to accelerate correct Zero Trust deployment globally.