CIO OPINION

If there ’ s no password to steal , hackers won ’ t be able to harvest credentials to carry out their attacks .

John Engates , Field CTO at Cloudflare

Zero Trust seems set to continue its rise in 2023 . John Engates , Field CTO at Cloudflare , explores why and how Zero Trust can be implemented effectively .

In response , the Biden administration issued an executive order in May of 2021 to implement a Zero Trust security architecture across the federal government . While recent reports from the US Government Accountability Office ( GAO ) show some agencies are on track , others appear to be falling behind . When governments need to move quickly and cut across organisational boundaries , they often appoint a czar to take charge of a particular program and see it through to implementation or execution .

As private sector organisations embrace Digital Transformation and move their operations to the cloud , they too are looking to Zero Trust to help provide a robust and secure network infrastructure . Secure Access Service Edge ( SASE ) has emerged as a clouddelivered convergence of network access and security services and is a common approach for enterprise Zero Trust adoption . The challenge however is that in many organisations , responsibility for networking and security live in different parts of the organisation and these groups often rely on different vendors in their respective areas . Breaking down the silos between security and networking teams and choosing the right tools , products and vendors to align with desired business outcomes is critical to implement Zero Trust in larger enterprises .

As pressure to implement Zero Trust intensifies , I predict that a role analogous to a ‘ Chief Zero Trust Officer ’ will emerge within some large organisations .

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