Dell Technologies Builds Ecosystem to Speed Zero Trust Adoption

Dell brings together more than 30 leading technology and security companies to create a unified Zero Trust solution.

Navigating security is like trying to make your way through a high-stakes labyrinth. There are so many different, complicated passageways that make it hard to reach your destination. Zero Trust can help ease this journey.

We’re leading a paradigm shift in security, but it’s going to take a village to bring it to life. This paradigm is Zero Trust, and we’re helping pull together the village through a robust partner ecosystem.

Zero Trust is a cybersecurity framework that automates an organization’s security architecture and orchestrates a response as soon as systems are attacked. The challenge, however, lies in implementing a complete solution guided by the seven pillars of Zero Trust. No company can do this alone.

To help private and public sector organizations simplify adoption, Dell is building a Zero Trust ecosystem. It brings together more than 30 leading technology and security companies to create a unified solution across infrastructure platforms, applications, clouds and services.

Through this ecosystem, Dell and its partners are paving the way to adoption. Together with the Maryland Innovation Security Institute (MISI), we’re providing best-in-class technology at the Zero Trust Center of Excellence and constructing an advanced private cloud solution focused on integrating and orchestrating security for customers. This approach will help organizations implement the technology and tap the expertise needed to build and configure the architecture.

Leading the integration of the Zero Trust ecosystem, Dell brings together technology and capabilities from partners including Corsha, Gigamon, Intel, Juniper Networks, MISI, Nomad GCS, NVIDIA, Palo Alto Networks, VMware and others. By replicating the Department of Defense-approved architecture with technology from leading providers, we’re enabling organizations to defeat cyber criminals while meeting the U.S. government’s Zero Trust mandate.

The ecosystem will help execute the Department of Defense Zero Trust requirements, including capabilities such as:

    • Continuous authentication: Continuously authenticates user access using multifactor authentication.
    • Comply to connect, device detection and compliance: Any device attempting to connect to a network or access a resource is detected and assessed for compliance status.
    • Continuous monitoring and ongoing authorization: Automated tools and processes continuously monitor applications and assess their authorization to determine security control effectiveness.
    • Data encryption and rights management: Data rights management tooling encrypts data at rest and in transit to reduce the risk of unauthorized data access.
    • Software defined networking: Enables the control of packets to a centralized server, provides additional visibility into the network and enables integration requirements.
    • Policy decision point and policy orchestration: Collects and documents all rule-based policies to orchestrate across the security stack for effective automation.
    • Threat intelligence: Integration of threat intelligence data with other security information and event management (SIEM) data provides a consolidated view of threat activity.

Zero Trust is a journey, and the destination is a well-defined set of integrated and automated security activities validated by the U.S. government and recognized around the world. The partner ecosystem is a critical component of Dell’s project to scale an end-to-end validated Zero Trust solution for organizations worldwide.

We look forward to sharing more on our Zero Trust strategy at Dell Technologies World 2023 in Las Vegas, May 22-25, 2023.

Herb Kelsey

About the Author: Herb Kelsey

Herb Kelsey is the Project Fort Zero Lead in Dell Technologies Chief Technology Office, building on an extensive multi-decade career. He began his career as a GE-trained engineer and manager, and subsequently as a successful software entrepreneur, an IBM-trained architect, IBM’s first CTO for Cyber Security and the Chief Architect for a U.S. Department of Defense’s mission support agency’s global portfolio. Herb supported the Intelligence Community around the world post-9/11, designing secure clouds, secure networks and agency-wide mission infrastructures. He was deployed to create the operational watch for our National Counter Terrorism Center and invent analytics for social media intelligence. Herb participated in joint R&D activities, including the system that became IBM Streams. In the commercial arena, Herb designed healthcare data analytics for the affordable care act, implemented cognitive solutions for IBM Watson and applied blockchain to secure software supply chains for globally distributed IoT devices.