Every security model has a control plane. For decades, that control plane was the network. If you were inside, you were trusted. If you were outside, you were not. That boundary dissolved long before many organizations were ready to admit it. Cloud adoption, SaaS proliferation, distributed workforces, API-driven architectures - all of it shifted the axis of trust. The network became transport. Identity became the arbiter. In a Zero Trust model, identity is not a feature. It i