John Sherman, chief information officer at the Department of Defense and a 2022 Wash100 Award winner, said he considers cybersecurity as his “absolute top priority” and that DOD wants to be a leader in the federal space when it comes to the adoption of zero trust principles.
“Zero trust is built on principles that the enemy is already in your network and the way we deal with that is constricting lateral movement throughout the network through what we call fine-grained access and also looking at things like not signature-based analysis, but behavioral-based analysis on who’s on there and making sure we have identity, credential and access management or ICAM and an entire suite of capabilities that comes at it much differently than we’ve been doing,” Sherman told Government Matters in an interview posted Friday.
He added that zero trust is critical in protecting an enterprise from cybersecurity threats.
Sherman, who also serves as acting chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, noted that procurement is now underway for the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, which is DOD’s flagship effort.
JWCC will bring “enterprise cloud capability at all three security classification levels – unclassified, secret and top secret – from the continental United States all the way out to the tactical edge. This is a capability we don’t have right now and it’s going to be critical for things like Joint All Domain Command and Control, AI and the Data Acceleration initiative, among others,” he said.
Sherman also discussed how his office advances JADC2, the role of the chief digital and AI officer and how the Pentagon helps U.S. European Command through the AI and Data Acceleration initiative amid the crisis in Ukraine.
Sherman will keynote the Potomac Officers Club’s 3rd Annual CIO Summit, scheduled for April 26 at Hilton-McLean in Virginia. Visit the Potomac Officers Club site to learn more about this event and view POC’s full calendar.
