Katharyn White, vice president of federal ecosystem at IBM, and Michael Epley, chief architect and security strategist at Red Hat, said agencies must take a holistic approach to cybersecurity to advance the implementation of zero trust architecture across the federal government, FedTech Magazine reported Thursday.
Both executives agreed that a holistic cybersecurity framework is key to expediting the adoption of zero trust security model in the federal government and keeping up with the ever-changing threat landscape.
White and Epley are members of an IBM working group that collaborated with federal agencies to identify and address challenges in the implementation of the modern network security architecture.
According to both executives, the lack of an in-depth implementation road map from the government and the absence of a common zero trust language also impede the rapid adoption of the zero trust access model.
To help address these challenges, the working group has established a zero trust lexicon and helped agencies develop their own maturity models and roadmaps.
“Our goal is to focus on improving that holistic posture as opposed to reverting back to approaches that are more reactive, more point-oriented, that we may have done in the past,” Epley said.