Defense Department Chief Information Officer John Sherman set the tone early in the year by telling Breaking Defense a major focus over 2023 would be aiming for baseline, targeted zero trust within four years.
In March, DISA announced Booz had produced a prototype of Thunderdome and laid “a zero-trust technology foundation.”
Balancing security and access to data are critical to providing users with trustworthy, reliable data for real-time decisions.
“Thunderdome has confirmed its potential by laying a zero-trust technology foundation, but the work doesn’t end there,” Christopher Barnhurst, DISA deputy director, said.
The document lays out some specific goals for DISA through the next two years, but also aims to generally change the agency's "relationship" with its data.
"While we have been working on developing a zero trust prototype for the unclassified network, we realized early on that we must develop one, in tandem, for the classified side," Christopher Barnhurst, DISA deputy director, said.
New framework designed "so we spend a vast majority of our time actually focusing on the security [...] and not spending, where we traditionally were, about 80% of our time just getting the paperwork ready so we could get an approval to operate."
Zero Trust is the Pentagon’s foundation for its modern cybersecurity strategy.
"As far as reaching out to kind of the multinational world and the federal space, we haven't yet, but that's something that's kind of on the roadmap for us to get to," Drew Malloy, technical director for DISA’s cyber development directorate, said.
With an eye on China, US military networks in the Pacific likely among first stops for Thunderdome zero-trust program after prototyping, DISA chief Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner told Breaking Defense.
Over the next six months, the Defense Information Systems Agency plans to produce the first working prototype of its zero-trust security and network architecture program that’s scalable across the Defense Department.
The new office is slated for October, Pentagon CIO John Sherman said, while also giving updates on the Spectrum Strategy implementation plan and the cyber workforce strategy.
Reducing cognitive overload on warfighters while improving “time to trust” for autonomous systems is a matter of design.