Zero Trust

In today’s cyber security environment, it can be confusing, overwhelming and even outright scary.  What marketing data do you believe?  Who do you trust and how long will it take to weed through it?  To make things even worse, the threats are not slowing down, the “Annual Cybercrime Report from Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that cybercrime will cost $6 trillion by 2021”.  Bad actors and malicious threats are no longer the only driving factors.  Today, IT infrastructures are no longer isolated as they were in the past.  With COVID-19 security was put to the test not only with the on premise datacenter, the network, the cloud and with the remote user.  In classified areas of the federal government what does zero trust look like?  Hybrid cloud and cloud applications throw a completely different challenge into the equation.

One of the big initiatives in the industry today is, “Zero Trust”.  If you think about that, it sounds impossible in most agencies or branches of our military, especially if you have thousands or tens of thousands of users.  Maybe even more so if you are in an armed services branch with deployments in remote theaters.

Let’s answer some of the questions about Zero Trust.

What is zero trust? Where do you start? What does a zero trust solution look like?

Let’s start off with the concept of zero trust.  The bottom line up front is to not trust anyone.  To cut off all access from everyone until they can be verified and or authorized.  This includes any machine or sensor with a serial port, MAC address or an IP address.

Where to start?  First, let’s think outside of the box, what is possible?  Depending on the size of the area to be secured, this could be a major project roll out, and it can be but is extremely important to the security of your mission.  Many zero trust roll outs can be completed in 30 days or less depending on the size of the infrastructure.  For the larger deployments, a phased approach is often the best choice.

The second, make the decision that you are going do whatever it takes to stop the threat actor.  Budgets play a big role in all aspects of the federal government, but having the right partner with the right contracts will help with getting the funds needed in many cases.

Third, is to educate yourself and align with a trusted partner/vendor to help dive deep and look at all the possibilities.  Focus on a partner that understands your mission and not someone trying to sell you something.

Fourth, setup a small roll out in a lab or a range to do a test or possibly a bake off between a couple solutions.  Finally, educate and train your team.  Training your team, that can be a challenge in itself as we all know that our DoD partners training is an ongoing challenge.  Make sure the solution you choose is easy to expand and manage.

Solution:

One of our proven solution’s that has prevented hackers from taking over runway cameras, isolating and hiding a complete ship, drone, server, datacenter, remote coms deployed in theaters around the world is accomplished by putting a digital cloak over IP address.  There are also many more use cases, just think of the possibilities regarding your requirements.  The art of possibilities here is anything with an IP address, a MAC address or serial port can have a digital cloak placed on it to make it invisible to threat actors, “If you can’t see it, you can’t hack it”.

The solution is “Cyberspace Operations Infrastructure” (CSOI).  CSOI can be deployed as a physical or virtual (or any combination) solution across many theaters of operation.  We combine software defined networking (SDN) and identity defined networking (IDN) as part of this integrated cyber defense solution with an easy to manage orchestration engine.

For more information on CSOI please visit: /impres-csoi

Let’s Start A conversation! To schedule a free consultation with one of our systems engineers to discuss your cyber security challenges, contact us at Cyber@www.imprestechnology.com

About IMPRES Technology Solutions
At IMPRES Technology Solutions, our federal customer’s requirements drive our solutions. By being a vendor neutral solution provider we can architect the correct solution to meet your requirements today and grow with you tomorrow.