Let’s Talk About Zero Trust

by Mark Cassetta on June 11, 2019

Written by: Mark Cassetta, SVP – Strategy

Last week I had the pleasure of attending Palo Alto Network’s customer conference (Ignite ‘19). We have been partnering with Palo Alto Networks for a few years now and attending Ignite is always a great reminder of how important it is that TITUS continues to explore how to connect multiple security outcomes for our customers from the network (cloud or on premise) to the endpoint.

One of the sessions I attended this week was presented by John Kindervag who is the field CTO of Palo Alto Networks and the founder of the Zero Trust security framework. We have known John for many years going to back to his time at Forrester when we were first introduced to the framework. This session was a great reminder of how powerful and at the same time consumable this framework can be. Something I hear from customers and partners worldwide is that for security professionals, it is almost impossible to keep up with all the trends/techniques/solutions that exist to prevent attacks (inadvertent or malicious). This session reminded me that the Zero Trust framework is a great starting point to get your arms around a holistic security strategy that everyone in your organization can understand whether you are in security or finance.

I must admit that when we first started partnering with Palo Alto Networks, it started from the ground up based on customer demand (as most partnerships do). However, the Zero Trust framework does an excellent job of highlighting our partnership value and connecting the dots across our solutions. During Tuesday’s keynote, Lee Klarich (CPO Palo Alto Networks) did an awesome job highlighting the reality most security teams face just trying to manage through the noise of alerts. While Palo Alto Networks continues to work on reducing that noise, having additional context based on the identity (category/classification/sensitivity) of the data could be a huge help. That’s where TITUS comes in. Our ability to provide critical context around data works hand-in-hand with Palo Alto Network solutions, creating what is ultimately a critical first step in the Zero Trust security framework.

Want to learn more about Zero Trust?
If you’re like me, once you learned about the potential of a Zero Trust security framework, you were eager to know more and understand how you could start to implement this within your organization. Thankfully, there’s a lot of valuable information available to guide you.

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If you are not familiar with the Zero Trust framework, there are a number of great resources available. Forrester continues to champion this strategy led by Dr. Chase Cunningham and Paul McKay who have published some great resources such as this webinar to get you started. I also highly suggest following Dr. Cunningham’s blog and his Twitter account where he regularly posts insights around Zero Trust as both a framework and as a methodology.

John Kindervag also continues to advocate and advance the Zero Trust framework through his blog at Palo Alto Networks. From a TITUS perspective, we are going to start putting more emphasis on our role in the Zero Trust framework as we see this as a practical and effective way to “ignite your security strategy.” Stay tuned for more on this.

Zero Trust continues to be a game-changer for organizations wanting to implement a truly effective security practice. We’re excited to help our customers and partners understand how their data protection efforts play an integral role in this initiative.