Name: Zero Trust Series | E4: Federal Government Considerations
Start: 2024-08-15T17:45:00Z
End: 2024-08-15T17:45:16.000Z
Location: BrightTALK

Empowering a secure, efficient, and innovative future for our nation’s most critical missions - Since 1991, Wildflower International, a WOSB, HUBZone business, headquartered in Santa Fe, NM has been providing information technology products, services, and solutions to Federal Government departments, specifically the Department of Energy and their DOE NNSA sites, DOD, DHS, and other agencies. Out primary contract vehicles include ITES-3H, SEWP V, DHS First Source II, GSA, SCMC, and MEUAS IV. 

Federal government agencies are grappling with numerous challenges, including aging legacy systems, highly manual workflows, and growing resource constraints—all at a time when expectations for transparency, agility, and high-quality citizen services are on the rise. In this environment, agencies not only have to optimize IT budgets and streamline vendor management but also modernize reporting structures and analytics frameworks to enable timely, data-driven decisions. Effective IT portfolio oversight has become crucial, as has the drive to grow internal IT capabilities and keep pace with rapid technological advances.
Moreover, as digital transformation accelerates, agencies must thoughtfully adopt and govern innovative technologies like AI and automation to deliver greater efficiency, security, and customer satisfaction. The pressure to support mission-critical operations while reducing risk and maintaining compliance is higher than ever.

AIOps in Action: Accelerating IT Modernization in Federal Agencies

In an era of increasing cyber threats, securing government networks is more critical than ever. Today, we explore how Network Access Control (NAC) plays a pivotal role in building a Zero-Trust framework for federal and state agencies. I am happy to be joined today with one of our key partners, Juniper Networks and their Director of Product Management, Slava Dementyev to talk about NAC and its criticality to helping Federal Government agencies build a strong security posture using a zero-trust approach for their wired and wireless infrastructure.

Securing Federal Networks: The Critical Role of NAC in Zero Trust Architectures

This episode is dedicated to Intelligence, Surveillance, & Reconnaissance or ISR for short. Its definition can vary from who you ask, but it’s an umbrella term to define activities associated with the collection, processing, and dissemination of critical information to key leaders so they can make informed and timely decisions.  These interconnected activities can be undertaken in many different forms under the intelligence field discipline, but the ultimate purpose is gain vital information on foreign adversaries, non-state actors, and even our allies. The technology that supports these activities is constantly evolving due to emerging threats that the US homeland faces, lessons learned from various conflicts that are currently being waged around the world and ones that the US are not directly involved in, and innovation from both large and small businesses.

Haivision | Episode 3: Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance

This episode is dedicated to Expeditionary Operation Centers for missions that involve traveling to distant hostile environments with little, to no existing infrastructure support upon arrival.  However, to be effective in these environments requires extensive logistical support for transportation, supply, and maintenance and ensuring timely and reliable support for equipment, fuel, and other resources is critical.

As such, Expeditionary Operation Centers must integrate various communication systems and technologies to ensure continuous connectivity, even in areas with limited infrastructure.

Having the capability to consolidate video assets from different sources in these environments ensures Advance Party Forces paint the most reliable and real time Common Operational Picture (COP) in a single viewable display.

Haivision | Episode 2: Federal Government Expeditionary Operation Centers (EOCs)

When federal government departments consider adopting Generative AI (GenAI), they typically ask a wide range of questions to address concerns related to implementation, security, ethics, and governance. These questions often reflect the complex and high-stakes nature of their operations. 

We are seeing a shift from the initial experimentation phase of LLMs to true production use cases. Companies aren’t just testing what LLMs can do anymore—they’re focusing on how to use them effectively. The aim is to drive employee efficiency, integrate LLM solutions into their business applications, and ultimately enhance customer satisfaction. This results in measurable business outcomes—real revenue, real productivity gains—that further drive adoption across industries.

In fact, it’s becoming increasingly clear that generative AI and LLMs are shaping the future of enterprise work. AI assistants will soon be everywhere, embedded into existing applications or tailored to meet specific business needs, making work faster, easier, and more impactful. The rise of intelligent chatbots, co-pilots, and AI agents is proof of this trend—2025 could very well be known as the year of AI assistants.

The Future of Work: Building Smarter with Retrieval Augmented Generation and AI Chatbots

Cyberattacks are on the rise, and they are growing more sophisticated and devastating every day. In the commercial space manufacturers are claiming that as much as 60% of cyber-attacks are coming through vulnerable copiers and printers.  Cyber threats are expected to continue to increase.

Most organizations have strong data protection and detection capabilities in place already. But most organizations are neglecting their copier/printer fleets as a key part of their data protection program. 

Additionally, these same NIST security standards are pushing federal organizations to bring their fleets in compliance. Organizations need to bring their fleets in compliance while bringing these better technologies to their end users.

Wildflower & TLG | Episode 2: The Need for Security & Standardization in Federal Government Copier and Printer Fleets

As copier/printer fleets age all over both commercial and federal customers, these fleets represent a security risk and represent an opportunity to reduce costs while improving automation. 

Over the last 24 months, federal organizations across all regions have started moving in this direction but have challenges. And, as more commercial organizations shift to cloud usage, federal agencies are reluctant to go there with concerns around the protection and security of cloud-based data assets.

To achieve these goals, federal agencies are moving ahead with fleet assessments to gain the information to implement a plan to standardize, right size and automate their fleet with software and monitoring tools to ensure security, save time and save money.

Wildflower & TLG | Episode 1: Latest Trends in Federal Copier & Printer Fleets

Today’s control rooms or Operation Centers including Network (NOC), Security (SOC), Emergency (EOC), Joint (JOC) etc.., are meant to bring information from disparate systems together so that analysts and leadership can see all relevant information together in a Common Operation Picture and gain Situational Understanding of events as they unfold so that they are equipped with the most accurate information to act on.

However, the federal government is facing a range of challenges with the current state of their operation centers. These challenges can include ensuring smooth communication and coordination among diverse entities, protecting sensitive and classified information, efficiently managing resources, including personnel, equipment, and funding, integrating new technologies with existing systems and ensuring they work seamlessly together, and the list goes on.

As part of a three-episode series dedicated to operation centers and secure information transport, joining me today, to dig into the conundrum currently facing the federal government, is our friend Jim Dedrick. Jim is an audio-visual communication solutions specialist with Haivision, one of Wildflower’s top partners in video teleconferencing.

Haivision | Episode 1: Federal Government Operation Centers

The diversity of data sources and the expansion of the remote workforce has resulted in a challenge to enforce security and maintain cyber resilience standards. In fact, 67% of organizations have concerns that their existing data protection measures may not be sufficient to cope with malware and ransomware threats. Agencies require assurances that data will be protected, secure, and available for recovery regardless of platform.  When data loss and downtime have a direct impact on mission outcomes, security becomes top-of-mind.

Dell APEX Backup Service | Episode 3: Security and Cyber Resilience

Protecting mission critical data and safeguarding your workforce is critical in today’s world. The explosion of data is coinciding with the expansion of data sources and the adoption of Cloud for enterprise use-cases. Ensuring business resilience and recoverability while meeting compliance targets is a challenge, especially when data resides across geographically dispersed locations and ransomware attacks are becoming more prevalent and sophisticated. 
Common challenges include ensuring that data is backed up and recoverable in the event of a disaster or data loss, protecting data from ransomware and other malware attacks, ensuring that data is secure and compliant with regulations, managing data growth and storage costs and providing employees with a seamless experience while ensuring that their data is protected.  Is there a solution that can address these issues across workloads within a modern data center environment?

Dell APEX Backup Service | Episode 2: Protect Mission Critical Workloads

Dell APEX Backup Services provide a robust and secure backup as-a-Service solution with long-term data retention and automated compliance features. Customers can manage SaaS applications, endpoints, and hybrid workloads consistently and efficiently through a unified console. With its unlimited on-demand scalability, Dell APEX Backup Services guarantee flexibility, efficiency and control.

Dell APEX Backup Service | Episode 1: SaaS-based Data Protection

Zero Trust projects aim to enhance security by assessing vulnerabilities, access controls, and potential risks at every level and creating a detailed roadmap to close security gaps and ensure continuous monitoring, strict access controls, and robust authentication methods throughout your network. This shift in perspective, from a perimeter-focused approach to one centered around continuous verification and strict access controls can be challenging, but your journey to get there doesn’t have to be.

Zero Trust flips the traditional notion of IT security on its head by assuming that no element, whether inside or outside the network, is automatically trustworthy.  This shift in focus is crucial, but the road to get there can be complex. Join Jeff Lockwood, Founder & CEO of Invicta Solutions Group, and Andrew Balzarini for a journey through Zero Trust in the third Zero Trust episode.

Zero Trust Series | E3: Zero Trust Projects, Explained

The decision to leverage the Cloud as part of a Data Protection strategy is dependent on several factors. Further, ensuring that data is protected to appropriate services levels across a multi-cloud environment, spanning multiple public clouds, datacenters, co-lo facilities and edge locations, can be complex. 
Join Paul Mitchell, Field CTO of Dell’s Data Protection Solutions, and Andrew Balzarini as they discuss the criteria for Multi-Cloud in the third Data Protection episode of “A WILD IDEA.”

Data Protection | E3: Multi-Cloud Considerations for Data Protection

Cyberattacks are on the rise, and they are growing more sophisticated and devastating every day. In 2023, the average cost of data loss was $2.6M. Ransomware attacks not only incur steep expenses for remediation and recovery, but they also inflict damage to reputation and negatively impact mission success. Cyber threats are expected to continue to increase. 
Most organizations have strong data protection and detection capabilities in place already. But could your organization recover if an attacker gets through the perimeter and encrypts or wipes your data? Additionally, how confident would you be in the integrity of that data that you were able to recover? Organizations need to consider recovery as part of their cyber resiliency and risk management strategies.

Data Protection | E2: The Need for Cyber Resilience

The concept of zero trust emerged in 2009 and challenged the traditional security model that relied on perimeter defense, assuming that everything inside the network is trustworthy. Initially proposed by John Kindervag, the Zero Trust model gained attention as cyber threats evolved beyond traditional defenses. The model gained momentum as cybersecurity professionals and companies recognized its effectiveness against increasingly sophisticated threats.
Google's implementation of a similar concept, BeyondCorp, reinforced the zero trust principles by adopting a model that focused on device and user authentication rather than a trusted network perimeter. This further popularized the idea of Zero Trust security beyond Forrester's initial concept.
Over time, with the rise in remote work, cloud computing, and diverse endpoint devices accessing networks, the Zero Trust model evolved into a comprehensive security strategy centered on continuous verification and strict access controls. While Zero Trust is becoming a guiding principle for modern cybersecurity frameworks, it can be surrounded by myths and misconceptions.

Zero Trust Series | E2: A Brief History of Zero Trust

As data proliferates across edge, core and public cloud, organizations are experiencing increased cyber security disruption and data protection risks. Over the last 12 months, organizations across all regions report a sharp uptick in cyberattacks that prevented access to their data, contributing to rising business disruption and resulting in steep financial losses. And, as more organizations shift to public cloud usage, there are increasing concerns around the protection and security of cloud-based data assets. 
To reduce risk and accelerate digital transformation, organizations identify multi-cloud data protection, cyber resiliency and “as-a-Service” solutions as high priority items for helping them shore up their data protection gaps and enable hybrid, multi-cloud operations.

Data Protection | E1: Latest Trends in Data Protection

Cyberattacks are continually evolving in both sophistication and frequency, an unfortunate reality in today’s increasingly connected world.  Thanks to a sudden shift to remote work, IT security perimeters extend well past an organization’s physical boundaries.  In a hybrid workplace, the potential attack surface – any access point that stores, hosts, or accesses an organization’s resources – is difficult to protect using a traditional approach. Enter Zero Trust: a paradigm shift in how we think about and approach cybersecurity.  

What is Zero Trust and why does it matter? Join Jeff Lockwood, Founder and CEO of Invicta Solutions Group, and Andrew Balzarini as they break down Zero Trust in simple, easy to understand terms.

Zero Trust Series | E1: Zero Trust in Simple Terms

Zero Trust

Zero trust is a cybersecurity concept that assumes no implicit trust within the network, regardless of whether the source is internal or external to the network perimeter. For the federal government, implementing zero trust requires careful consideration of several factors.

Zero Trust Series | E4: Federal Government Considerations

Cyber Security

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Enterprise Applications

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Zero Trust Series | E4: Federal Government Considerations

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Wildflower International