Moving to a Cyber Platform Can Drive Further Tool Rationalization, Consolidation
Drew Epperson, Vice President for Federal Engineering at Palo Alto Networks, explores how broader use of cloud services is opening the door wider for agencies to rationalize and consolidate cybersecurity tools across their ecosystem.
So what we're articulating, and what we found in a lot of the customers we've worked with inside of the public sector space, is that Zero Trust does not actually have to mean a bad user experience. And in some cases, by using things like machine learning and artificial intelligence and automation in the back end, we can actually provide a better user experience.
We have one customer that was leveraging our sassi platform that was telling us that working from home, they were getting better speeds and better access to applications than when they were working on site of the government location. And a lot of that is just the way the architecture is designed the fact that we're using public cloud infrastructure, we're using a global fiber network. So you know, what we're finding is that Zero Trust can be an enabler for a better user experience.
In Federal there's a couple of specific reasons why I think platforms are really interesting. One is, hypothetically they save cost, they drive more efficiency, they're easier to train on, because that's one platform instead of 30 products. And then I think the real big one is under the guidance of Zero Trust, you really need consistent enforcement all the way through the digital transaction.
That becomes increasingly hard when you have five or six things on the endpoint 10, 15, 20 things on the network, other things in the cloud, different things in the sock. I think we're getting to the point where people just want consistent policy enforcement regardless of who the user is, what device they're on, where they're going, or what app they're engaging with. And in order to deliver that platforms provide a more efficient and a more streamlined, consistent way to do it.