Zero Trust security is built upon seven pillars: users, devices, network, data, applications and workloads, automation and orchestration, and visibility and analytics. These pillars represent both systems to be monitored and sources of information for security decisions. Implementing Zero Trust faces challenges like complexity, disparity between systems, speed concerns due to extensive scrutiny, and fragility in integrations. A unified data speed layer is crucial for practical Zero Trust implementation, with data logs, metrics, traces, and alerts forming the basis for informed decisions. Elastic's Search AI Platform provides real-time relevance by ingesting any data, enabling semantic and hybrid search. This platform supports retrieval augmented generation (RAG) for AI operations by vectorizing knowledge bases. Data products, tailored units of information, are essential for composing complex Zero Trust decision chains. Without a unified layer, manual, fragile, and slow connections between disparate systems hinder Zero Trust. Elastic's platform allows platform-agnostic deployment and cross-cluster search, with data normalized to a common schema for secure access. This distributed approach enables scalable, secure data connections for effective Zero Trust.