In January of 2022, Presidio Federal, partnered with Cisco and GovExec, brought together a panel of experts to discuss how to manage zero trust in this new complex environment. Panelists included:

• Sanjeev Bhagowalia, Assistant Commissioner, Office of Information and Technology and Chief Information Officer, U.S. Customs and Border Protection
• David Shive, Chief Information Officer,General Services Administration
• Clark Anderson, Security Solutions Architect, Presidio Federal

In this webcast attendees discuss:

• Best practices to secure increasingly critical resources (multifactor authentication, zero trust, micro-segmentation, & network visibility)
• Agency experts’ experiences with inter and intra-agency communications and data protection capabilities
• Next steps on where to look for expertise in implementing a true Zero Trust environment

Background on Zero Trust:

The Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity driving federal agencies, their employees, and customers to find new ways of identifying, deterring, and responding appropriately to sophisticated cyberattacks. The Zero Trust model combined with multifactor authentication tools (MFA), provide balance between security and usability for workforce, workloads, workplace, and user devices. FSIs help agencies to design a customized, structured environment for applying “never trust, always verify, assign least privilege” by leveraging the right tools to secure access across applications and environments. These approaches are agnostic as to the content and composition of an agency’s network and provide a strategic framework for continuous verification of a system’s operational status with respect to security objectives.

Agencies’ efforts have been underway to create more effective ways to collaborate with employees and mission partners, while providing critical services to the public. Agencies, their integrator partners and carefully selected OEMs recognize the importance of technologies such as cloud, edge computing, and wireless 5G to magnify reach and help to achieve their overall mission.

At the same time, cybercriminals and hackers have honed their skills to infiltrate agency assets and the wider, less protected, attack surface. A well-planned security architecture and continuous IT modernization efforts can protect federal networks for both cloud and on-prem resources. The time is now for Agencies to execute their updated cybersecurity strategies.