Cyber 3 MIN Read
GDIT Celebrates Cybersecurity Awareness Month with Cyber Tech Exchange Series
October 22nd, 2021
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In recognition of October as Cybersecurity Awareness Month, GDIT’s Cyber Center of Excellence created a series of internal technology exchanges focusing on the Transformation to Zero Trust that bring industry partners together with our workforce to discuss some of the most important considerations of Zero Trust implementation and the latest on the Cyber Executive Order. Our GDIT Cyber Center of Excellence provides extensive reach back to our support our customers through skilled talent, innovative solutions, and alliance partners.
GDIT’s Cyber Tech Exchange features four Sessions, 12 presentations, and four Alliance Partners. The “Tech Exchange” series includes engaging virtual events designed to bring an intense and intentional focus to a specific cybersecurity topic. In each session, GDIT leaders discuss core cyber capabilities, success stories and alliances, and invited guests discuss why a particular emerging cyber technology is important, what’s driving that importance and what’s next in the space. Recordings of the events and the presentation materials are accessible to GDIT employees on-demand after the events, adding to their reach and impact.
“GDIT places a huge priority on continuous learning and development in order to enable our cyber workforce to lean forward with emerging technologies and stay ahead of new threats,” Dr. Matthew McFadden, GDIT’s Cyber Vice President and Distinguished Technologist for GDIT’s Cyber Center of Excellence said. “This is how we’re able to more effectively address our customers’ challenges and deliver mission impact as trusted partners.”
“GDIT places a huge priority on continuous learning and development in order to enable our cyber workforce to lean forward with emerging technologies and stay ahead of new threats. This is how we’re able to more effectively address our customers’ challenges and deliver mission impact as trusted partners.”
The first event featured GDIT partner Palo Alto Networks. Rajeev Karamchedu, Program Manager for the company’s Prisma Cloud, talked about Zero Trust and its impact on Cloud Workload Protection. Importantly, he noted that when it comes to workload protection there is a place for Zero Trust among users, applications, and infrastructure. “When we put all of these functional domains together, you get a matrix, and you can see how any cloud workload protection approach should work and especially how Prisma Cloud enables Zero Trust.”
GDIT Cyber Tech Exchange 2021 Partner Presentation by Palo Alto Networks
PERSPECTIVES
GDIT Cyber Tech Exchange on network access and segmentation.
Karamchedu also told the group that the world of containers and legacy virtual machines will continue for a while and, unlike cloud migration, there is likely no such a thing as ‘lift-and-shift’ model for Zero Trust. So, he continued, partners need to help agencies take pieces of a Zero Trust architecture and apply it in priority areas, across the matrix, while helping them answer questions and being careful not “shove a square peg into a round hole.”
The second of the sessions focused on Endpoint Protection Platforms and featured Larry Kovalsky, Director of Federal Sales Engineering, from Crowdstrike. He talked about the company’s Falcon platform and its endpoint security capabilities, specifically how it enables the “1-10-60” framework, which is a metric Crowdstrike uses to measure its performance in the event of an incident. It aims to detect or prevent an incident in under a minute; to investigate and understand it in under 10 minutes; and to contain and remediate the issue in under 60 minutes.
“If you let things go over an hour, that’s when things get pretty ugly … [so] if we can prevent things from getting to a full-fledged breach in under an hour, that’s a worthy goal,” Kovalsky said.
GDIT Cyber Tech Exchange 2021 Partner Presentation by Crowdstrike
Future sessions will include presentations from Zscaler and Appgate, on network access and segmentation respectively. We expect them to be as well attended and information-rich as the first two and are thrilled to have these resources available to our teams – especially as Zero Trust becomes an ever-more important area of focus for us and for our customers.
