Sometimes it takes just two basic data points for the U.S. government to fully grasp the scale of cloud security today.

It was the end of November, during a hearing before the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and Zscaler Inc.’s compliance executive was suddenly asked a question.

“I was testifying in front of the Senate, and one of the questions I got asked was: ‘How many security updates do you see in a year?’” recalled Stephen Kovac (pictured), vice president of global government and compliance at Zscaler. “Well, we do over 200,000 a day — 200,000 security updates … every single day. And we’re doing that over 200 billion transactions-a-day run on AWS.”

Kovac spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed how Zscaler partners with Amazon Web Services Inc. to meet security needs for a wide range of clients and the data-focused demand for protection in organizations of all sizes today. (* Disclosure below.)

Government plan for zero trust

Zscaler’s partnership with AWS provides a small glimpse into the magnitude of the challenges facing private and public sector organizations in keeping operations secure. These challenges are now the subject of Congressional hearings as ransomware attacks and major breaches made numerous headlines over the past year.

The government’s increased interest in security led to the issuance of an Executive Order in May, which mandated that all agencies must create a plan for zero-trust security. This has brought further focus on existing government certification programs for cloud vendors, such as FedRAMP and Impact Level 5 in the Department of Defense.

“Every agency must produce a plan for zero trust,” Kovac noted. “Our cloud platform that is on AWS is a zero-trust platform. It is the first and only zero-trust platform to get authorized by the federal government at the FedRAMP level and now the IL5 level.”

The need for zero-trust security extends beyond the federal government. State and local governments, along with small businesses, are now confronted with a heightened need to protect key information assets.

“If you think back in the day, companies didn’t have chief compliance officers that worked in the space like we do now,” Kovac said. “My true job is really around the data. Even car dealerships today, you never thought of them having a security officer, but they do. That data security is there, it has to be; it’s a real threat.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: AWS Public Sector sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE