About this site
This site is a place for practitioners who work with complex systems and want to understand Zero Trust more clearly in practice.
Over the course of my career, I’ve worked across networking, infrastructure, security, and identity — often in environments where systems were already live, interconnected, and carrying real operational risk. I didn’t come to Zero Trust through a single, clean path. I came to it the same way many people do: by being asked to support, design, troubleshoot, and evolve systems as the architecture shifted underneath them.
What I’ve seen consistently is that Zero Trust doesn’t fail because people lack skill. It creates friction because it brings multiple technical domains together in ways most roles were never expected to own simultaneously. Networking, DNS, certificates, identity, application behavior, and policy all intersect — and that intersection is where confusion usually shows up.
This site exists to document those intersections.
Why I’m Writing This
I’m writing this for the people doing the work — engineers, administrators, and operators who already understand parts of the system, but want clearer mental models for how those parts interact in a Zero Trust environment.
The intent isn’t to prescribe a “right” way to do Zero Trust or to explain things at a theoretical level. It’s to share practical context: why certain assumptions exist, where deployments tend to get brittle, and what level of understanding is actually required to operate confidently day to day.
Most of this knowledge is learned informally or under pressure. Writing it down makes it easier to access — and easier to share.
What You’ll Find Here
The content on this site is practitioner-oriented and experience-driven. It focuses on:
- The technical sub-domains Zero Trust depends on
- Common points of friction once Zero Trust is live
- Practical explanations over abstract models
It’s not vendor documentation, marketing material, or certification prep. It’s meant to function more like a reference you can return to when something doesn’t behave the way you expect.
A Note on Platforms and Examples
The concepts discussed here are intended to be vendor-agnostic. Zero Trust principles don’t belong to any one platform.
When a concrete example is useful, I use Zscaler as a reference simply because it’s the platform I’m most familiar with and have the easiest access to for demonstrating real-world behavior. The examples are meant to illustrate concepts, not prescribe solutions.
About the Author
I’m Ryan Ulrick. I work across networking, security, and Zero Trust environments, with a strong focus on automation and operational scalability — especially in systems that are already live and evolving.
A large part of my work has involved reducing manual effort, clarifying policy behavior through automation, and helping teams move from fragile, one-off changes to repeatable, observable processes. That perspective heavily influences how I approach Zero Trust: not just as an architecture, but as something that has to be operated, changed, and maintained safely over time.
I’m writing this because I remember what it felt like to cross these domains for the first time — and because practical, automation-aware explanations should be freely available to the people responsible for keeping systems running.
Start your own thing
Enjoying the experience? Get started for free and set up your very own subscription business using Ghost, the same platform that powers this website.