Patrick Dedham, deputy to the commanding general to the U.S. Army’s Network Enterprise Technology Command, said NETCOM is overseeing continuous improvement projects for the service branch to achieve a zero trust network.
In an article published Wednesday on the Army’s website, Dedham stated that there are seven pillars of a zero trust architecture: user; data; device; network; automation and orchestration; visibility and analytics; and application and workload.
“NETCOM’s end state is to have a DoDIN-A based on Zero-Trust principles that treat every system connection and endpoint as a threat using four main premises: log and inspect all internal and external traffic, control attempted access to networks, keep network resources secure and verify all sources and resources,” he wrote.
Dedham noted that the command performed a gap analysis on existing Army and Department of Defense capabilities and identified 26 gaps across the seven pillars’ dependencies.
He cited several measures to mitigate the identified gaps such as granular data access control and internet-accessible endpoint management and security.
Dedham also mentioned the activities NETCOM is conducting to support DOD’s zero trust capabilities and highlighted the role of continuous improvement and integration of an Army unified network to enable the service to achieve its end state when it comes to cybersecurity.
