Issue Zero trust, transparency and provenance are reclassified from best practice to prerequisite

Summary

NTT DATA argues that several trust measures once treated as aspirational have become mandatory foundations. Zero trust architecture, cognitive transparency and verifiable data provenance are no longer optional ideals, according to the report. Instead, they are conditions for safety, for meeting regulation and for maintaining public confidence. The shift follows from AI moving into critical operations, where adaptive cyberthreats and opaque models create new risks. The report pairs this with a call to move from conventional cybersecurity toward proactive, self-learning defence that protects both data and the models themselves. For organisations, the practical consequence is that these capabilities must be built in from the start rather than added later.