Federal Zero Trust: Why the Protect Surface Matters

To date, federal Zero Trust initiatives have focused on driving broad actions that protect the whole of the attack surface. In alignment with foundational zero trust principles, DHS flipped the script by being the only federal agency that clearly defined the “protect surface”—the smallest set of mission-critical assets to which protections can be applied and managed—and building a zero trust architecture that enables controls to be placed tightly around them. Understanding the organization’s zero trust protect surfaces is the key to data-centric security: By zeroing in on your critical data, assets, applications, and services, and enforcing policies as closely as possible to the resource being protected, you achieve far stronger protection and compliance, while also limiting the cost and risk of your zero-trust implementation. In this 60-minute session, Virtru's Federal GM, Shannon Vaughn and Don Yeske, former Department of the Navy Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and former DHS Zero Trust lead, and now Senior Solutions Architect at Virtru, will:

• Explain the essential elements of zero trust architecture—Subjects, the Control Plane, and Resources—and describe why Protect Surfaces (the logical inverse of attack surfaces) are critical to any zero trust architecture
• Share best practices for identifying and securing mission-critical data, assets, applications, and services
• Map Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) and Enterprise Risk Data Management (ERDM) practices into a Protect Surface-first approach
• Provide a practical, data-centric roadmap for federal agencies and other organizations to follow