AI-powered nation-state cyber threats have entered a new phase. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, WWT's Head of National Security and Critical Infrastructure Madison Horn joins former NSA Director Rob Joyce to break down what's changed and why business leaders should be paying close attention.

In today's hyper-connected, hybrid, multi-cloud world, cybersecurity incidents are increasingly targeted, costly, and disruptive, with breaches taking an average of 277 days to identify and contain and costing $4.45 million on average. Attackers exploit a lack of visibility and segmentation to access high-value assets, posing a significant threat to cyber resiliency. The Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation Platform offers a solution by providing unprecedented visibility across cloud, endpoint, and data center environments from a single console. It enables security teams to easily configure, deploy, and monitor segmentation, setting granular policies to control communications and isolate high-value assets, effectively stopping breaches and ransomware from spreading and strengthening cyber resiliency.

Attackers often have a deeper understanding of their target environments than the targets themselves, allowing them to quickly exploit weaknesses, especially with AI at their disposal. Without a clear understanding of network activities, organizations cannot secure their environments effectively. While segmenting critical assets can prevent ransomware spread, understanding risk and exposure is crucial for effective segmentation. The Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation platform supports a zero trust strategy by providing end-to-end visibility, mapping assets, identifying risks, and offering intelligence to reduce the attack surface. It allows organizations to map connectivity, reveal vulnerabilities, and build security strategies around actual risks, all from a single console. Illumio enhances cyber resilience by offering comprehensive visibility to identify and mitigate risks.

A vault door is only as secure as the strategy behind it. In the digital world, we often focus on the "door" (security tools) while ignoring the intelligent process required to govern who gets near our data, when they can access it and why. This video uses the commercial bank vault analogy to simplify the five foundational steps of a Zero Trust journey. Zero Trust isn't a one-time project; it's a repeatable process. Watch to see how these steps can be applied across your entire environment and how WWT can help you move from a whiteboard drawing to a validated, real-world roadmap.

F5's Shawn Wormke and WWT's Chris Konrad say the rapid operationalization of AI is creating a widening gap between innovation and protection—leaving most organizations unprepared for real-world threats, governance failures and the coming quantum era.