“As President Biden’s cybersecurity executive order (EO) stretches past its first year, Federal agencies are at varied points in their progress on the EO’s orders. Federal leaders say it is important for agencies to approach the EO’s zero trust components strategically and understand their networks as they make the move to a zero trust architecture…
Dawn Berry, the Federal lead for security architecture and engineering at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) under the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said that while CMS was taking initial steps toward zero trust, the first step was looking at the agency’s existing architecture.
‘We had to take a look at our existing advanced enterprise architecture and figure out – with the most recent EO – what are we already achieving and what could potentially be an area we have to change,’ Berry said on the panel. ‘Then we have to make some very big decisions about what should go where.’…
‘We have all kinds of tools in and out from the different areas that are always changing. And we buy these tools, and they all work in this this huge, wonderful, advanced enterprise architecture,’ Berry said. ‘We looked for ways to create a new data layer where we can talk to a lot of different holes at the same time and pull data from many different sources.’
‘This idea of an overarching layer of data aggregated might not be [just] for one tool but it can pick up information and intelligence from whatever tools are coming and going,’ she added. ‘That was a second turning point for us because we can’t see our assets and we can’t see what’s inside then we can’t do that. That’s the one hindrance for us to get to the end goal zero trust and the other things that are in the EO.’…” Read the full article here.
Source: Cyber Central: Agencies Need to Approach Zero Trust Strategically – By Lamar Johnson, May 19, 2022. MeriTalk.
