Abstract

The rapid expansion of distributed remote work ecosystems has fundamentally transformed enterprise cybersecurity governance, operational resilience, and digital infrastructure management. While remote and hybrid working models have improved organisational flexibility and productivity, they have simultaneously intensified cyber risk exposure through decentralised endpoints, fragmented governance controls, expanded attack surfaces, and increasingly sophisticated threat vectors. Existing cybersecurity governance approaches frequently emphasise technical controls without sufficiently integrating socio-technical resilience, digital sovereignty, regulatory interoperability, and governance-centric Zero Trust architectures. This study proposes a Governance-Centric Zero Trust Framework (GCZTF) integrating Compliance-by-Design governance, digital sovereignty principles, socio-technical resilience engineering, and adaptive security orchestration for secure remote work ecosystems. A mixed-method research methodology combining comparative framework analysis, governance maturity evaluation, qualitative thematic synthesis, and scenario-based implementation modelling was adopted to evaluate the proposed framework across healthcare, financial services, telecommunications, and public-sector environments. The findings demonstrate that governance-centric Zero Trust architectures significantly improve organisational resilience, compliance readiness, operational visibility, incident response efficiency, and long-term cybersecurity sustainability. The study further establishes that cybersecurity governance must evolve beyond conventional perimeter-centric security paradigms toward integrated governance ecosystems capable of supporting resilient distributed enterprise infrastructures. The proposed framework contributes theoretically by extending Zero Trust governance into a socio-technical and sovereignty-oriented paradigm while operationally providing a scalable implementation architecture for secure remote work governance. The research therefore establishes a unified governance-oriented pathway for resilient cybersecurity transformation within modern distributed enterprise environments.

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