Cloud Security Alliance Teams with CrowdStrike, Okta, and Zscaler to Create Focal Point for Zero Trust Education and Best Practices

CSA’s Zero Trust Advancement Center to develop research, training, professional credentialing and an online center for community Zero Trust resources

SEATTLE – March 9, 2022 – The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), the world’s leading organization dedicated to defining standards, certifications and best practices to help ensure a secure cloud computing environment, today announced the launch of the Zero Trust Advancement Center. This initiative is being made possible by CrowdStrike, Okta, and Zscaler. The center brings together several existing research and educational projects at CSA that will be disseminated online and through its global network of chapters.

“CSA’s large community has made it known that there is a lot of confusion about Zero Trust. Many IT and security executives, as well as the rank and file, report that they do not have access to quality education that explains Zero Trust in a vendor-agnostic setting, frames it as a set of guiding principles, and helps provide context around the myriad of related solutions. We are thrilled that industry leaders CrowdStrike, Okta, and Zscaler share our perspective around Zero Trust as a strategy and are partnering with us to accelerate the creation of standards-driven Zero Trust knowledge in our new center,” said Jim Reavis, CEO of Cloud Security Alliance.

The activities being undertaken in the next 18 months include courses in Zero Trust architecture and strategy, a CloudBytes webinar series, several research whitepapers, an annual Zero Trust Summit to be initiated in Q4 2022, and a new professional credential, the Certificate of Zero Trust Knowledge (CZTK). CSA will release the results of a new survey, CISO Perspectives and Progress in Deploying Zero Trust, at the CxO Trust Summit to be held June 6, 2022 at the RSA Conference.

“In today’s mobile, work-from-anywhere world, identity has become the new security perimeter. According to the CrowdStrike 2022 Global Threat Report, nearly 80 percent of breaches leverage identity to compromise credentials and evade detection in organizations’ networks,” said George Kurtz, CEO and co-founder of CrowdStrike. “We built CrowdStrike’s Zero Trust solution on our best-of-platform architecture to deliver the modern attack defense pillars - endpoint and workloads, identity and data - and address the adversary problem, whether it is in the cloud, on-prem or in a hybrid environment. The time is right for us to accelerate the deployment of Zero Trust industry standards, and we look forward to working with CSA, Okta, and Zscaler on this initiative.”

Todd McKinnon, CEO and co-founder of Okta, said “Organizations across sectors — from the government to technology to banking — require solutions that mitigate risk, reduce friction, and work within their existing technology environments. Our goal is to relieve customers from the complexity and overhead of legacy solutions while delivering a secure, scalable, and compliance-based access experience that fully supports their business goals and objectives. This is why Zero Trust is so relevant, and why we're proud to support CSA's efforts to shape industry thinking on this topic.”

Jay Chaudhry, CEO, chairman and founder of Zscaler, commented, “The network security model has to be turned on its head. The old castle-and-moat approach to defending the user, application, and data facilitates lateral threat movement once intruders get inside the network. The architecture needs to change. That's where Zero Trust access comes in. Trust no one. Based on identity, based on device posture, based on other attributes, then connect only the right user to the right application and data, not to the network. That's where organizations must shift to, and we’re pleased that CSA continues to lead in educating the market on this crucial shift in architecture and approach.”

The Zero Trust Advancement Center builds upon several existing CSA projects, including the groundbreaking Software-Defined Perimeter research series, Cloud Controls Matrix, Enterprise Architecture and other related virtualized security models. Organizations can register their interest and participate in the program by navigating to cloudsecurityalliance.org/ZT.

About Cloud Security Alliance
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) is the world’s leading organization dedicated to defining and raising awareness of best practices to help ensure a secure cloud computing environment. CSA harnesses the subject matter expertise of industry practitioners, associations, governments, and its corporate and individual members to offer cloud security-specific research, education, training, certification, events, and products. CSA's activities, knowledge, and extensive network benefit the entire community impacted by cloud — from providers and customers to governments, entrepreneurs, and the assurance industry — and provide a forum through which different parties can work together to create and maintain a trusted cloud ecosystem. For further information, visit us at www.cloudsecurityalliance.org, and follow us on Twitter @cloudsa.