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Latest — 31 Aug 2026

Why AI Agents Are Breaking the Old Gateway Model

Part 5 of "The Gateway Sprawl" series Across the last three posts, a pattern kept repeating itself. The internet access gateway governs network path and answers "can this traffic get through." The API gateway governs request contracts and answers "is this credential valid." The

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The Middle Layer Everyone Forgets: What Identity Brokers and CASBs Actually Do

Part 4 of "The Gateway Sprawl" series Part 3 ended with a promise to look at the layer that seems, on paper, like it should close the gap we've been circling for two posts now: identity brokers and CASBs. They deal directly with identity. They sit

Securing the Contracts Between Systems: What API Gateways Actually Do

Part 3 of "The Gateway Sprawl" series Part 2 ended on a specific gap: internet access gateways see traffic that flows through them, and a large share of modern access — particularly service-to-service API calls — simply doesn't. That's exactly where this post picks

The Original Perimeter, Reimagined: What Internet Access Gateways Actually Do

Part 2 of "The Gateway Sprawl" series In Part 1, we mapped out four planes of gateway control and made the case that most organizations only have a clear picture of one of them. For a lot of security teams, that one plane is the internet access gateway

Setting the Table: What Do We Mean by "Gateway"?

Part 1 of "The Gateway Sprawl" series A few years ago, I sat in a room with a security team that had just finished a textbook zero trust rollout. Every laptop was enrolled. Every internet-bound connection ran through their access gateway. Split tunneling was locked down, SSL

N8N Field Notes

This post is a running log. I'm building out a fair amount of n8n automation lately, and I keep bumping into small gaps between what the platform does and what's easy to find in the docs. Rather than write a new post every time, I'

Walking a DNS Failure in a Zero Trust Environment

A cloud-brokered Zero Trust app loads, policy allows it, and identity succeeds—yet it still fails. This walkthrough shows how a single DNS record can bypass enforcement and how to diagnose it step-by-step.

DNS in Zero Trust: Why It Breaks First

DNS doesn’t change in Zero Trust — its position in the access path does. This post explains why DNS issues surface early, how resolution and enforcement drift out of alignment, and what “good enough” DNS understanding looks like for practitioners.

Zero Trust Assumes You Understand the Network (Even If Vendors Say Otherwise)

Zero Trust doesn’t eliminate networking — it assumes you understand it. This post reframes how networking skills still matter in Zero Trust environments, why familiar instincts can mislead, and what “good enough” fluency actually looks like in practice.

How To Use the Zero Trust Primer Series

Zero Trust assumes familiarity across networking, identity, DNS, certificates, policy and more. This series is a practitioner-focused primer on how those domains interact in real deployments, and what “good enough” understanding looks like to operate confidently.