Industry Cyber Experts Call on Agencies to Adopt Zero Trust; Zscaler’s Stephen Kovac Quoted

Cybersecurity experts are urging government agencies to accelerate the adoption of zero trust capabilities in the wake of a cyber attack involving a vulnerability in SolarWinds’ Orion software, FedScoop reported Saturday.

Implementing a zero trust approach involves the use of a collection of platforms including secure access service edge, microsegmentation and cloud workload protection capabilities that provide agencies with complete visibility into their networks and help them implement security policies across their infrastructure. However, industry experts said many agencies end up adopting only one or two of these capabilities.

“They’re kind of operating on the fly,” said Stephen Kovac, vice president of global government and compliance at Zscaler. “They’re buying one solution and thinking they’ve got zero trust now.”

Sean Frazier, federal chief security officer at Okta, said agencies should conduct an inventory of assets on their network, implement multifactor authentication for privileged accounts and transition identity and access management tools to the cloud to advance zero trust adoption.