Appgate Federal|November 11, 2021
Federal Agencies: Make a Secure and Scalable Move to Cloud With Zero Trust
Most government organizations and federal agencies make use of the cloud for at least some, if not all, of their IT needs. But the promise of the cloud won’t work without Zero Trust security baked in.
Trends are undeniable things. The move of workloads to the cloud continues to grow as evidenced by the big three—AWS, Azure and GCP—all reporting continued quarter-over-quarter revenue and compute/user growth of their platforms. And the cloud lure is seductive … very quick access, easy to prototype new services and tools, easy to grow and shrink usage on demand, the age-old OPEX vs. CAPEX discussion and more.
Then there’s the all-in phrase of “going cloud native” that describes an approach to software development utilizing cloud computing to build and operate workloads at scale in modern and dynamic computing environments such as a public cloud. And in some cases, cloud native refers to using tools offered by public cloud providers to create low code and ephemeral services that are transitory in their use (i.e., serverless).
For security and technology constraint reasons many government resources may never move to the cloud, which means hybrid workloads are the reality for most federal agencies. However, while it will take a long time for ANY organization to fully move resources from on- premises to the cloud, the march isn’t going to stop.
Cloud Drivers and Zero Trust Mandates
Much like the saying, “compensation drives behavior in a sales representative,” there is well-defined and growing IT compensation for federal government organizations to increase their use of cloud computing including:
- Newer methods of accessing hosted workloads/services (i.e., metadata) and tagging (#killtheIPaddress)
- Automation in scalability (autoscaling features) and security (GitOps/security as code)
- Removing the use of passwords (#killthepassword)
- Near real-time ability to manage the state of access (Zero Trust) and scale (API integrations)
But the great promise of the cloud WILL NOT WORK without proper security baked into everything. In fact, based on the recent executive order, not only has cloud consideration been mandated, but Zero Trust security for cloud and on premises is also a directive. This order specifically calls out Zero Trust as the way forward. Zero Trust security will finally allow the government to properly manage network access without depending on outdated technology processes.
Appgate SDP makes move to cloud more secure
Appgate SDP is an industry-leading Zero Trust Network Access solution that is being tapped by federal government agencies to make the move to the cloud more secure and scalable by delivering:
- Robust APIs that are easy to integrate with other parts of a ZT or SASE architecture
- Ability to read metadata/tags and work with password-less technologies
- Autoscaling
- Ability to work in public clouds and on-premises (hybrid) seamlessly
- Option to be delivered as code
- Be part of DevSecOps, DevOps or GitOps automation framework
And we recently announced that Appgate SDP will be soon offered as a FedRAMP-approved ZTNA as a service solution via Rackspace Government Cloud. To learn more, visit www.appgate.com/federal-division.
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