Ep. 291 Compliance Without the Bottleneck: Zero Trust in Federal Clouds

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When cloud computing was introduced, it was quite a simple concept: leverage other people's hardware to scale easily. Not too much to manage.

However, today's cloud world has metastasized. Today, federal leaders live in a world of on-prem, multiple clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds, and even sovereign clouds. Complications arise when they are burdened with compliance requirements and staff reductions.

Today, we sat down with Ryan McArthur from Zscaler to discuss how to effectively manage a cloud environment when challenged with deploying Zero Trust. He begins by sharing his experience helping federal leaders understand the inherent risks of the VPN system.

Few realize that VPN technology was first introduced by Microsoft back in 1996, and then popularized with Windows 4.0, which included built-in support. Thirty-year-old technology can present severe limitations.

Unfortunately, the popularity of VPN technology increased with the demands of remote computing during COVID. We are now in a situation where many enterprises have built their architecture on this dated technology.

Ryan mentions that one key to juggling clouds is to focus on the applications themselves. He emphasized Zscaler's ability to securely connect users.

If you want more information about Zscaler, you should attend the Zscaler Public Sector Summit in March, where you can discuss and collaborate further.