Zero trust has emerged as the consensus best approach to cybersecurity in recent years as cyber threats continue to rise. However, the intangible nature of zero trust has left some organizations wondering how to best implement it, which tools to use and what zero trust success ultimately looks like.
2023 Wash100 Award winner Matt Tait, CEO and president of ManTech, is uniquely positioned to answer that question. ManTech developed zero trust architecture for the Department of Defense, and the company also helped the DOD set up labs for testing zero trust applications.
Within the company, Tait personally led ManTech’s nine month zero trust implementation, and he emerged from the process with two key lessons learned.
“The first one is leadership from the top. This really has to be top-driven to make it a success,” he said in an exclusive video interview with Executive Mosaic.
“The second thing is, it’s less about the technology and more about the people — the change management, changing the behaviors of people are so important,” Tait added.
Beyond zero trust, Tait also discussed the emerging technologies he anticipates will have the greatest impact on national security in the next few years. However, while some technologies have great potential to be disruptive in the federal landscape on their own, Tait said, “I believe the future is around the combination of technologies.”
“We have something that we call ‘cognitive cyber’ and this is a combination of cyber, automation, AI and analytics. Having this together really helps solve a unique set of problems for us,” Tait explained.
Watch Matt Tait discuss ManTech’s next chapter, how cybersecurity and national security intersect and more in his video interview.
