Ep. 52 Cloud Security for Large Federal Organizations “If it’s reachable, it’s breachable”

March 2, 2023

Today’s interview focuses on how the commercial success of Zscaler and its hundreds of patents can help large military organizations reduce costs and increase security of a cloud transition.

A good way to understand the challenges that the U.S. Army facing was by some of the comments that Ray Iyer, the Army’s Chief Information Officer, made during his recent exit interview.

When he started his position, he characterized the information technology the Army used as being decentralized. This resulted in duplicate systems and no standard way to prevent attacks. By making the transition to the cloud, he had to look above the stovepipes to see duplicate systems and optimize any investment they made.

Stephen Kovac from Zscaler outlines how their technology can help leaders like Ray Iyer be able to reduce costs for a cloud transition from massive systems.

Stephen starts by discussing Zscaler’s achievement of FedRAMP High level across the board. This is unique because it allows them to reach all levels of secure data in a military application. When that is combined with Zscaler’s Security Cloud, the DoD can provide communications that are not only secure but fast.

"And we can provide faster updates, patches, all those things that the cloud brings into what we call it the cloud effect, being able to service our customers, and be able to respond quickly to security threats anywhere at the globe"

Stephen Kovac, Zscaler Tweet

Essentially, Zscaler provides a secure “first hop” during an interaction with a federal system. It is secure because it can completely obfuscate the ability of a malicious actor to intercept the communication. In a humorous and entertaining phrase, Hansan Bae from Zscalar sums up the threat by saying, “If it’s reachable, it’s breachable.” Zscaler provides a solution that eliminates the ability for a malicious actor to “reach” a system.

The message is clear: use a trusted intermediary technology to provide you with secure, flexible, and scalable access.

If you would like to hear more about federal applications, Zscaler has an inaugural Public Sector Summit on March 8, 2023. It has federal leaders talk about overcoming the challenges of large systems that can enable them to implement Zero Trust.

If you enjoyed this article, you may want to listen to Ep. 46 Software Project Management and the shift left.