UPDATED 13:00 EDT / MAY 23 2023

SECURITY

With Project Fort Zero, Dell expands its zero-trust security offerings

Dell Technologies Inc. announced today its Project Fort Zero as the latest in a series of its zero-trust networking services and products.

The project is a combination of a public/private partnership with the U.S. government and the Maryland Innovation Security Institute’s Dreamport facility along with dozens of supporting companies. Dell will deliver a finished product within the next year, when it will be certified at Dreamport by the Defense Department against its established architectural plan that was first codified last July.

The facility is used for a variety of collaborative and interoperability testing, along with live “cyber ranges” where vendors can run simulated cybersecurity exercises. For example, Dell can test the effectiveness of built-in security hardware protection of its personal computers, such as to prevent BIOS and firmware tampering.

The DOD’s reference architecture includes seven different pillars that underly its implementation of zero trust (below), protecting users, data, networks and workloads. Zero trust refers to the idea that no person or device can be trusted, and then applying automation and identity controls to protect them and dealing with exceptions on a timely basis.

The project is designed to be used in a variety of circumstances, including on-premises data centers, remote locations and temporary field installations. Complementary with the project is the announcement of Dell’s Product Success Accelerator for Backup, to simplify and strengthen backup and recovery tasks. That joins a companion Product Success for Cyber Recovery tool that was announced earlier in March.

One of the issues for backup administrators is that ransomware actors have gotten more skilled at locating and destroying backups as part of their attack playbooks. Dell’s Product Success offering will “simplify the activities needed to plan, deploy, optimize and operate a secure, isolated cyber recovery vault,” according to the company.

Dell joins numerous other security vendors that have recently begun to bulk up their zero-trust product and services lines, including Check Point Harmony, Zscaler Private Access, Cloudflare Access, Netskope Private Access and Palo Alto Networks Prisma. Many of these products are souped-up edge protection technologies, with one goal being creation of an end-to-end validated zero-trust collection of products and services.

What is interesting about the Dell announcement is its emphasis on the longer view toward better planning and implementation, as well as combining products with services to help manage and continually refine zero-trust deployments.

Given that the term has been in use for more than a decade — it was invented back in 2010, by then-Forrester analyst John Kindervag — this isn’t all that unusual. But the expansion of remote working thanks to the pandemic, attention by the DOD toward encouraging its use, and a great integration of cloud and on-premises applications has fostered a new look at the benefits of zero trust.

Featured image: geralt/Pixabay; zero-trust graphic: Dell

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