FNN Expert Edition: The Zero Trust Journey and Beyond

In this ebook, we share articles featuring the federal and industry guests from Day 1 of our Cyber Leaders Exchange 2023, which focused exclusively on where the government is with its zero trust efforts along with tips and tactics to help you continue your own journey. Featuring insights from government agencies, including:

• OMB’s Chris DeRusha on tactical zero trust progress, culture change
• Navy’s Cmdr. Nick Goddard, Barry Tanner and David Voelker on making zero trust a reality, not just an objective

We all know that cyber efforts across the government didn’t begin with the White House’s executive order on improving cybersecurity. In fact, federal zero trust efforts in the government didn’t begin then either.
Many agencies started their zero trust journeys well before the cyber EO in May 2021. What’s more, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated those efforts for many agencies when most of their employees suddenly needed access to enterprise services to do their jobs from, quite literally, anywhere.
Witness the Navy, which has implemented a Version 1 of its zero trust model across the service. It took advantage of the sudden uptick in remote users to closely pair its planned Microsoft Office 365 rollout with a hard push forward on zero trust.
“This was the first time that the Navy decided to essentially go all in with cloud capabilities,” said Barry Tanner, chief operations officer for the Navy’s Program Executive Office for Digital and Enterprise Services. “When we started that journey, we made a conscious decision to start with a blank sheet of paper and use the work that had been done by the National Security Agency and Cyber Command’s experimentation to build those lessons into the implementation of Office 365 for the Navy.” (Read the full story about the Navy zero trust journey on Page 14.)
And as Tanner — along with Cmdr. Nick Goddard of the Navy Cyber Defense Operations Command and David Voelker of the Office of the Navy CIO — pointed out, zero trust is not a one-and-done program. The Navy model will continue to evolve, as will the need to continue working with other agencies and industry partners.
That’s also something that has become clear to Carahsoft, which was the presenting sponsor of Federal News Network’s Cyber Leaders Exchange 2023. “What customers are actually buying is getting more complex. While customers buy licenses for certain solutions, they can’t do that when it comes to their cybersecurity posture and their cybersecurity roadmap,” said Sehar Wahla, director of Amazon Web Services partner business development. “Customers are evolving their strategies to lean more on consulting partners and managed service providers.”

Vanessa Roberts
Editor, Custom Content
Federal News Network

Download the full report to learn about the latest developments in zero trust.