The Pentagon’s deadline for zero-trust compliance is fast approaching, with significant, direct impacts on both military and civilian agencies. By FY 2027, they all must secure their legacy, on-premises and cloud applications to the same zero-trust standards, yet their operational technology is a persistent challenge: Multiple locations and IT systems make cybersecurity hard to manage.
The solution to securing these fragmented and diverse systems is simplification. A unified platform can apply cybersecurity policy and enforcement, including zero-trust protocols, across the network. By combining next-generation firewalls and intrusion detection and protection in a single platform, agencies can meet zero-trust demands while streamlining operations and increasing efficiency.
“If you look at any agency … with multiple branch units, regional offices [and] a growing remote workforce, they all have to have the same level of secure access to a mix of different on-premise and off-premise or cloud-based applications,” said John McDonald, Vice President of Federal Sales at Versa Networks. “It’s modernizing our security stance to reflect how our modern agency workforce is accessing the different applications and data.”
In this video interview, McDonald explains how agencies can meet the federal deadline and bring their applications and data into zero-trust compliance. Topics include:
- The special challenges civilian agencies face in implementing zero trust
- Why operational technology is so hard to secure
- How preparing for zero trust improves operations and saves money