JUST IN: Army Goes Full on Zero Trust Principles
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The Army is looking to quickly accelerate its campaign to consolidate and consolidate its various networks and do so securely under Zero Trust principles, a senior service leader said at a Pentagon briefing on April 17. .
The Army is implementing an integrated network plan. This centralizes services and enables personnel, whether military or soldier, to log in from any device anywhere in the world. And Zero Trust is the secure way to do this, said a briefing official.
“All you have to do is look at the latest news and understand why implementing this Zero Trust concept is so important,” said Lieutenant General John Morrison Jr., Army Deputy. Chief of Staff, G-6, said at a media roundtable on April 17.
Zero Trust is the term for a cybersecurity paradigm focused on data and resources that “assume nothing,” said the Army article. As the saying goes, the priority is to protect your data, not just your network and servers. Leverage attributes to determine access to resources such as users, locations, and devices. This principle is part of the Army’s digital landscape transformation.
Morrison said implementing a Zero Trust strategy would not only improve the Army’s security posture, but dramatically improve the user experience. The two, he said, go hand in hand, and cybersecurity and user experience “doesn’t necessarily have to be a trade-off. You just need the right balance.”
Incorporating Zero Trust Principles into “Everything” [the Army] It includes ongoing initiatives to improve mobility, including user experience, involving more than 22,000 service members, he said. The initiative includes a pilot of personal-owned devices involving approximately 7,000 service members and a virtual desktop service delivered to remote locations or personal devices.
Morrison said the concept of centralized service delivery under Cyber Army Command, the Army’s single service provider and network defender, would see the organization’s network collapse in the next two years. I’m here. The Army plans to transition to a single, well-resourced helpdesk that will prove not only financially efficient, but operationally effective.
“Because it will be a common service for all Army commands,” he added.
Morrison called “significant investments” in Zero Trust activities, including items that accelerate end-to-end visibility and set the conditions for broader network implementations focused on modernization, “especially our mission network”.
According to Morrison, identity and credential initiatives are an important part of Zero Trust. “…This allows users to go anywhere on the Army portion of the DoD information network and instantly log on and do business.” A formation that can plug, connect and fight — “something we’ve been talking about for years” — is now coming to fruition, he said.
The Army’s chief data and analytics officer, David Markowitz, said the Unified Network Plan will introduce zero trust initiatives, including the ability to trust devices, network upgrades, migration to the cloud, and continued emphasis on network visualization analytics. I said it was underscored by principles.
The collapse of the network and the elimination of one-offs will mark the harmony of a single unified network based on Zero Trust principles, Morrison said. “And it’s a place where military users can move seamlessly, operating with a common look and feel that has the right security built in, no matter where they’re operating.”
One of the Army’s 2023 goals is the centralized delivery of services and common endpoint management across the Army, whether at the tactical level or at the broader operational or strategic level.
Markowitz said continued network service delivery and network integration are central to the Army’s strategic direction from a series of capability portfolio reviews.
Markowitz said the Army has “a lot” of different networks. “And we are accelerating how we integrate them both operationally and administratively.”
He said there is “great impetus” to accelerate “these actions as much as possible” in 2023 and 2024.
Morrison called 2023 the “year of acceleration,” but it was also the year of building towards “this concept of an integrated network built on Zero Trust principles.”
“What we can do with it is roll out the network end-to-end, and for the first time we can see the whole network,” he said. Being able to seamlessly deploy a network around the world “has greatly improved the speed and speed with which we can deploy troops.”
Not only did he call the digital transformation an “exciting time” for the Army, but it also “forced” a “lot of changes” and a cultural shift. [them] to think differently. Zero Trust, he said, is not a thing, but a set of guiding principles.
topic: cyber-
