CenturyLink’s Zain Ahmed, Campbell Palmer Talk Gov’t Needs to Support Secure Telework

CenturyLink senior leaders have said that agencies need to update their network architectures in order to accommodate continuing telework needs in line with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s guidelines, FedScoop reported Monday.

Zain Ahmed, vice president of civilian and law enforcement sales at CenturyLink, said at a prior virtual event that agencies should consider investing in efforts to evolve network infrastructure to support continuous telework for multiple days and comply with CISA’s Trusted Internet Connections 3.0 initiative.

Campbell Palmer, solutions architects manager for the company’s public sector division, added that industry can help government entities in matters such as data security which are crucial in adopting permanent remote work options amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There’s some education involved,” he said. “And what we need to do is make sure we’re helping these agencies recognize that we can help develop their [open network architecture] plans with their TIC 3.0 environment to allow for that adoption and taking on that [authority to operate].”

Earlier this year, CISA announced that it intended to release the third iteration of the TIC program to include additional use cases involving cloud and remote work.

According to a poll by the Advanced Technology Academic Research Center, around 15 percent of federal agencies have already integrated TIC 3.0 guidelines into their operations.