In brief:
- Federal cybersecurity risks are changing as adversaries evolve their approaches to target new vulnerabilities.
- More open and cloud-based systems expand the attack surface and upend the traditional notion of perimeter security.
- To combat this, federal agencies are embracing zero trust architectures (ZTA) as their new cybersecurity framework.
- Accenture’s XDR for Government is built for zero trust, offering the speed, agility, and intelligence needed to stay ahead of the threat.
With dramatic changes taking place throughout the federal computing environment, security goalposts are shifting. A government-wide move towards more open and cloud-based systems expands the attack surface and explodes the traditional notion of perimeter security. More recent events, such as the shift to work-from-home, the emergence of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), and 5G and IPV6 are accelerating this trend. As a result, new cybersecurity risks are emerging as adversaries evolve their approaches to target these growing vulnerabilities.
Given this new landscape, federal agencies are embracing zero trust architectures (ZTA) as their new cybersecurity framework. First coined by John Kindervag (with Forrester Research at the time), zero trust holds that no environment is entirely secure and therefore, trust within the network is often misplaced. Furthermore, it recognizes that most investments focus on securing devices and networks at the expense of the enterprise data that are the organization’s crown jewels.
Building on this initial concept, Forrester recently described zero trust (content accessible to Forrester client or via purchase) as “…a conceptual and architectural model for how security teams should redesign networks into secure micro-perimeters, use obfuscation to strengthen data security, limit the risks associated with excessive user privileges, and use analytics and automation to dramatically improve security detection and response.”
