Continuous Monitoring of Policies and Access under Zero Trust

Continuous monitoring of policies and access consists of constantly observing how the permissions granted within the Zero Trust architecture are being used, comparing the real behavior of users and devices against expected patterns, to detect deviations that could indicate a compromised account or a misconfigured policy. This matters in practice because defining strict access policies at the start doesn't guarantee they remain correct over time, since roles change, temporary service accounts are created and never deleted, and attackers actively look for exceptions left open through carelessness. A concrete example is a monitoring system that detects that a service account, which normally only accesses a specific resource in the early morning to run automatic backups, starts requesting access to other systems during the day, a signal that triggers an alert for immediate review before it turns into a bigger incident.