The Pentagon’s senior information security official, David McKeown, confirmed today that the Defense Department remains on schedule to implement its zero trust cybersecurity framework by fiscal year 2027 as originally planned. McKeown, who serves as the DOD’s deputy chief information officer and senior information security officer, emphasized the diligent efforts of his office in ensuring a seamless rollout of the initiative after publishing the Zero Trust Strategy and Roadmap in November.McKeown attributed the Department’s progress in implementing the key capabilities outlined in the roadmap to successful collaborations with private sector partners. Through these partnerships, commercial cloud providers have analyzed their offerings and joined forces with other service providers to achieve the 91 identified capabilities required to reach the zero trust target. McKeown expressed confidence in the positive trajectory toward 2027, highlighting the formation of strong relationships in the process.Once fully deployed, the zero trust framework will revolutionize the DOD’s approach to network security by minimizing exposure to cyber threats, enabling efficient risk management and data sharing, and facilitating rapid containment and mitigation of adversary activities. McKeown emphasized that each step taken to implement the zero trust framework enhances the DOD’s overall security posture.The zero trust strategy, unveiled in the fall, outlined four primary goals: cultural adoption, security and defense of DOD information systems, technology acceleration, and zero trust enablement. McKeown acknowledged the ambitious nature of achieving these objectives when the strategy was initially introduced. Leading the initiative is Randy Resnick, the director of the Zero Trust Portfolio Management Office, who is spearheading the deployment of zero trust across the DOD in collaboration with various service branches and agencies.McKeown provided the progress update on the DOD’s zero trust framework implementation during the Government Executive 2023 Cyber Summit held in Washington. Learn More