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Trust Governance Three‐Year Trust Governance Implementation Plan
Over the next three years, our enterprise will implement a Trust Governance program—a strategic shift from identity-centric access governance toward capability-centric, formally verifiable authorization governance. At a high level, identity-centric access governance inventories people and their entitlements. Capability-centric authorization governance is a process to inventory the assets of the organization and the policies that protect them. Unfortunately the identity-centric "people" approach is not meeting the challenge of AI or the growing interconnection of our company with partner and vendor digital infrastructure.
This initiative will leverage advances in automated reasoning to create mathematical proof of authorization correctness across all business systems, reducing manual processes, reducing the company's risk exposure, and improving compliance readiness.
The program will be delivered in three phases:
- Foundation (Year 1): Establish governance structure, visibility, and proof of concept
- Institutionalization (Year 2): Operationalize governance workflows and continuous verification
- Continuous Assurance & Scale (Year 3): Embed telemetry, analytics, and process automation enterprise-wide
The measurable objective:
Govern with Proof — Catalog all company capabilities against access policies and use automated reasoning to continually verify their correctness.
- Reduce Authorization Risk: Prevent misconfigurations and drift through formal verification mathematical proofs and continuous monitoring.
- Improve Compliance Posture: Use "declarative security" to declare the required state of compliance and use automated reasoning to prove it's consistent with policy.
- Enhance Business Agility: Enable secure, verifiable change management to support both new business services and new regulatory policy requirements. Manage trust with supply chain and vendor access "federations".
- Unify Governance Processes: Align trust, authorization, human identity, and software identity under one coherent framework.
- Demonstrate Measurable ROI: Show reductions in audit findings, access incidents, and governance overhead.
The following KPIs will be reported quarterly to measure progress and to set goals.
| Category | KPI |
|---|---|
| Coverage | % of assets under management |
| Compliance | % of compliance requirements declared |
| Effectivness | % of applications that support real time revocation |
| Federation | Total number of trusted domains |
| Policies | Total number of policies |
| Efficiency | Average time for policy testing and approval |
Objective: Establish the core governance model, technology foundation, and executive alignment.
Key Initiatives:
- Governance Charter: Define the Trust Governance mandate, steering committee, and reporting cadence.
- Capability Inventory: Catalog enterprise capabilities (Action–Resource pairs) extracted from existing policies.
- Schema & Policy Baseline: Create enterprise schema definitions for Cedar authorization models.
- Formal Verification Pilot: Validate “govern with proof” concept in one major business system.
- Governance Dashboards: Implement basic coverage and correctness KPIs.
Processes Implemented:
- Policy & schema change management integrated with existing continuous integration and development workflows (e.g. Github).
- Executive approval gates for new capabilities and schema changes.
- Initial audit evidence automation.
Success Criteria (End of Year 1):
- Formal verification successfully applied to at least one system.
- Baseline governance metrics operational.
- Executive leadership endorsement for enterprise rollout.
Objective: Expand trust governance from initial pilot to an enterprise operational program, embedding formal verification and compliance reasoning into development and risk management workflows.
Key Initiatives:
- Policy Lifecycle Automation: Implement PR-based governance gates with formal proofs attached to every policy change.
- Federation & Token Governance: Standardize issuer validation, token revocation, and cross-domain trust chain monitoring.
- Declarative Compliance Management: Formalize compliance requirements as machine-verifiable statements tied to capabilities and policies.
- Training & Enablement: Certify policy authors, schema stewards, and compliance officers on trust governance processes.
- Evidence Factory: Automate generation of cryptographically signed compliance proofs and attach to every approved policy release.
Processes Implemented:
- Full Trust Governance lifecycle operational (Discover → Model → Design → Prove → Approve → Distribute → Observe → Improve).
- Federated PR and schema workflows integrated with risk management tools.
- Quarterly steering committee reviews with KPIs and governance maturity assessments.
Success Criteria (End of Year 2):
- __%+ of enterprise assets governed under policy proof.
- __% coverage of enterprise capabilities managed via automation of policy release and verification pipelines.
- Meaningful linkage between capabilities, compliance requirements, and implemented policies.
- Reduction in authorization-related incidents by half compared to baseline.
Objective: Achieve continuous verification and auditability across all enterprise systems, with Trust Governance embedded as a first-class control process across security, compliance, and engineering.
Key Initiatives:
- Continuous Assurance Dashboards: Provide real-time telemetry, policy drift detection, and compliance posture visualization.
- Cross-Store Reasoning: Conduct enterprise-wide analysis for equivalence, disjointness, and dependency across policy stores.
- AI-Augmented Governance: Apply analytics and ML to detect anomalies, optimize policies, and forecast compliance risk.
- Integrated Threat Response: Automate policy and token revocation workflows triggered by Shared Signals or threat events.
- Global Federation Governance: Unify and continuously validate all partner and vendor trust chains.
Processes Implemented:
- Continuous monitoring of coverage, correctness, and risk posture.
- Quarterly trust audits with external verification of proofs.
- Integration of Trust Governance results into the enterprise risk dashboard and annual board report.
Success Criteria (End of Year 3):
- Trust Governance metrics integrated into enterprise risk reporting.
- Continuous assurance dashboards live and reviewed by the board.
- Full enterprise coverage of assets and capabilities under policy governance.
- Real-time compliance evidence available for internal and external audits.
- Demonstrated __%+ reduction in authorization-related incidents and __% reduction in audit preparation time.
- Enterprise recognized as an industry leader in “Governance with Proof.”
Executive Governance Structure:
- CISO (Program Owner): Accountable for Trust Governance execution and risk outcomes.
- Chief Architect: Oversees schema, policy, and federation design alignment.
- CIO: Ensures operational integration across IT and DevOps teams.
- Risk & Compliance Committee: Validates metrics, approves proofs, and manages external audits.
- Trust Hub Steering Committee: Cross-functional group ensuring continuous improvement and alignment with business objectives.
Business Integration Process:
- Each business capability assigned a technical and business owner.
- Policy changes leverage existing continuous integration enterprise tools and workflows.
- Quarterly capability reviews with security and business leadership.
Reporting Cadence:
- Monthly: Operational metrics (coverage, policy changes, incidents).
- Quarterly: KPI scorecard for executive review.
- Annually: Governance maturity assessment and strategic recommendations.
Metrics Dashboard (Continuous):
- Policy correctness and coverage trends
- Federation health and issuer trust status
- Audit readiness and evidence integrity
- Authorization incident trends
- Risk score per business capability
| Dimension | Definition of Success | Measurement Method |
|---|---|---|
| Security Posture | Reduction in authorization vulnerabilities and drift | Incident trend analysis and formal verification logs |
| Compliance | All required audit evidence generated automatically | Cryptographic audit trails verified by compliance team |
| Operational Efficiency | Reduced cycle time for policy releases and governance approvals | Time-to-approve and PR pipeline metrics |
| Business Alignment | Clear mapping between capabilities and business objectives | Capability-to-policy linkage and ownership matrix |
| Cultural Adoption | Governance practices embedded in daily workflows | Training completion, governance gate adherence |
Estimated 3-Year Investment: ≈ $_._M (professional services + platform costs)
Expected ROI: Payback within 24 months via:
- __% reduction in authorization incidents
- __% reduction in compliance costs
- __% improvement in business capability visibility
- __% reduction in audit preparation time
Trust Governance represents the next evolution of enterprise security—governance with proof, where authorization confidence is no longer inferred but mathematically demonstrated.
By investing in this program, we will transition from manual, reactive identity governance to an automated, provable, and auditable framework that strengthens trust across our entire digital ecosystem.