A Guided Approach to Support Your Zero Trust Strategy

As the world’s workforce sought to overcome the COVID-induced pandemic, a remote workforce suddenly became the new normal. At break-neck speed, information technology (IT) organizations were working to improve the security of millions of new endpoints that were accessing a network not optimized for remote work. To keep pace with these overwhelming security and risk management requirements, aggressive modernization initiatives were launched to include embracing new cloud-based services to quickly provision, operate, monitor and respond to security incidents. This emergent complex, hybrid infrastructure presented a new threat landscape that represents the new normal. It also became the perfect backdrop for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to release its Special Publication (SP) 800-207 on Zero Trust Architectures (ZTAs) and in the United States, President Biden’s Executive Order 14028, Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity, calling for the adoption of ZTAs.

As organizations contend with complying with a federal mandate, developing modernization journeys to the cloud and implementing resiliency from new attack vectors, the lead authors of this paper from the CSA-DC Chapter aimed to provide a guided approach on how organizations can navigate a highly complex environment to develop a Zero Trust (ZT) strategy.

Although ZT is in its infancy, we hope this paper provides a snapshot of the complexity and infancy of ZT adoption. We believe it helps IT stakeholders with a deeper understanding of:

• An evolving and broad technology landscape
• New government initiatives from CISA on a ZT Maturity Model
• Developing a ZT strategy through conducting a ZT Maturity Assessment and developing a ZT Roadmap
• The impact technology, culture, policy, and regulatory factors have on the ability for organizations to adopt a ZTA

This paper concludes with recommendations on how ecosystem stakeholders can improve collaboration to accelerate the adoption of ZT in their environments and meet government mandates.

Download "Toward a Zero Trust Architecture" to read more.

Lead Authors

• Chairperson: Mari Spina (Mitre)
• Juanita Koilpillai (Waverly Labs)
• Greg Bateman (F5)
• Rebecca Choynowski (Mitre)
• Paul Deakin (F5)
• Dr. Allen Harper (T-Rex Solutions)
• Jay Kelley (F5)
• Aubrey Merchant-Dest (Broadcom)
• Salil Parikh
• Uma Rajagopal (AWS)
• Vivian Tero (Illumio)
• Phyllis Thomas (Thomas IT Consulting)
• Jyoti Wadhwa (T-Rex Solutions)

Learn more about Zero Trust by visiting CSA’s Zero Trust Advancement Center.