DOD Office Framing Assessment Steps on Zero Trust Overlays Playbook, Director Says

The Department of Defense’s Zero Trust Portfolio Management Office is creating a five-step procedure to assess a zero-trust solution before its procurement by DOD units, Randy Resnick, the office’s director, said. 

Resnick, a 2024 Wash100 awardee and speaker in a past Potomac Officers Club event, also told participants at the recent AFCEA TechNet Cyber conference that the assessment process will continuously validate the zero trust infrastructure to check if its network protection remains dependable and adequate, DefenseScoop reported.

Resnick’s announcement follows the release in early June of the Pentagon’s “Zero Trust Overlays” road map, a nearly 400-page document detailing the DOD strategy to meet goals set by the Biden administration’s executive order on the safe development and deployment of artificial intelligence.

According to Resnick’s AFCEA presentation, vendors will have to disclose before the assessment process the number of targets their proposed zero-trust solution aims to achieve. 

Proceeding to the assessment proper, the vendors’ proposed zero trust solution goes to the procedure’s first three steps composed of multiple validation tests on its target levels and baseline infrastructure to check performance upon deployment.

The fourth step involves benchmarking the solution against the zero trust overlays defined in the recently released playbook.

In the fifth step, the DOD will deploy a monitoring assessment tool to continuously check on configuration breaches or changes and other potential concerns.