- Go to the KuppingerCole Booking tool webpage.
- Under Select a Service, select Leadership Compass Briefing 55 mins.
- Under Select Staff, scroll down and select Alexei Balaganski
- Choose date and time between March 2 - 27, 2026 that are convenient for your team. Please note: Times will be shown in your time zone.
- You will receive an MS Teams invite that you can forward along to others in your company. Alternatively, you can use this as a placeholder and send us an invite with another app.
- Please prepare a slide deck and provide it to the analyst.
Zero Trust Platforms Briefing Outline
The objective of the session is to understand your product’s concrete capabilities, architectural approach, and differentiation against the defined market segment and evaluation criteria.
General Expectations
Focus on substance, not marketing. We are already familiar with Zero Trust concepts, ZTNA history, and general market narratives. Please do not spend time on:
- Generic Zero Trust introductions or definitions
- Market trend slides or analyst quotes
- High-level vision decks without technical depth
Time spent on such content directly reduces the time available for evaluating your solution.
Product-centric discussion is essential.
The briefing should concentrate on what your platform actually does, how it is implemented, and how it is used in real environments.
A live or guided demo is mandatory.
We expect to see the product UI, workflows, policies, and analytics in action. Slides alone are insufficient.
Recommended Briefing Structure
1. Company and Product Context (5 minutes)
- Brief company overview and positioning in the Zero Trust Platforms market
- Product scope and major components relevant to this Leadership Compass
- Primary customer profiles and deployment scenarios
2. Architecture and Deployment Model (10 minutes)
- Supported delivery models
- Scalability and resilience across hybrid and multi-cloud environments
- Integration with existing identity infrastructures (e.g., AD, LDAP, cloud IdPs)
- Approach to legacy applications and non-cloud-native workloads
- Agent-based versus agentless enforcement where applicable
3. Core Capabilities (Aligned with Evaluation Criteria)
Please structure this section explicitly around the evaluation categories below. We do not expect every solution to cover all capabilities, so please focus on those you do support. You do not need to cover every feature exhaustively, but clarity and technical depth are essential.
- Secure Connectivity: Authenticate-before-connect, network cloaking, mutual authentication, encrypted traffic
- Access Management: Identity- and attribute-based policies, continuous authorization, just-in-time access
- Strong Authentication: MFA, passwordless options, adaptive and risk-based authentication
- Context and Posture Evaluation: Device, user, or workload posture; integration with EDR/XDR, MDM/UEM, cloud telemetry
- Segmentation and Lateral Movement Control: Identity- and service-based segmentation across workloads, applications, and services
- Monitoring and Analytics: Session visibility, behavioral baselining, anomaly detection, performance insights
- Threat Prevention: Controls against credential abuse, malware propagation, and insider misuse
- Data-Centric Security: Encryption, DLP, redaction, and policy enforcement tied to data sensitivity
- Audit and Compliance: Logging, reporting, and regulatory support (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS)
- Performance and Scalability: Latency, global coverage, concurrency handling, architectural limits
- User and Developer Experience: End-user transparency, administrative usability, APIs, SDKs, policy-as-code
- Integration and Ecosystem Interoperability: SIEM, SOAR, DevOps, IAM, and cloud platform integrations
- AI and Machine Identity Protection: Controls for service, API, device, and AI identities, including segmentation and least-privilege enforcement
4. Demonstration (Mandatory, at least 20 minutes)
- Management console, basic deployment, policy management, enforcement workflows, etc.
- Realistic scenarios for both human and non-human access
- Monitoring, analytics, and investigation workflows
- AI-related or automation capabilities, where applicable
The demo should reinforce the claims made earlier, not introduce entirely new concepts. There is no need to spend time on trivial operations, please focus on major differentiating capabilities and innovative workflows. Please use a demo environment with realistic data in sufficient quantities.
5. Differentiation and Roadmap (5–10 minutes)
- Clear articulation of what differentiates your platform from peers
- Near-term roadmap priorities relevant to Zero Trust Platforms
- Known limitations or trade-offs (openness is appreciated and expected)
6. Wrap-Up and Q&A
- Reference customers, deployments, or representative use cases
- Time for clarification questions and discussion
Final Notes
This briefing is not a sales presentation. It is a structured technical and architectural discussion intended to support an independent analyst evaluation. Vendors that use the time efficiently, focus on real capabilities, and demonstrate operational maturity will benefit most from the process.
If you have questions about scope or expectations ahead of the session, please raise them early rather than attempting to resolve them during the briefing itself. Thank you for your cooperation.
