Zscaler’s Patrick Perry: Focusing on Data Security Could Help DoD Support Teleworking

Patrick Perry, director of emerging technology for federal, defense and intelligence community at Zscaler, wrote in an opinion piece published Wednesday on Fifth Domain that the Department of Defense should strike a balance between security and operations as it moves its workforce to a teleworking environment.

Perry said DoD should shift its focus from network security to data security to support teleworking and manage large data volumes and increasing bandwidth requirements.

He also discussed the Secure Access Service Edge approach termed by Gartner and its potential benefits.

“As a cloud-based ‘as-a-service’ architecture, SASE provides direct access to the internet/cloud, while pushing security as close to the user/data/device as possible – to the edge,” Perry wrote. “SASE unifies security functions, such as secure web gateway, next-generation firewall, data loss prevention, cloud-based sandboxing, browser isolation, and zero trust network access into one framework.”

Perry also explained how zero trust access could help defense agencies reduce the attack surface, build up cybersecurity posture and improve user experience.