Coast Guard Officials Highlight Necessary Steps for Effective Zero Trust Adoption

U.S. Coast Guard officials said the service needs to invest in data management to get the most out of zero trust.

Speaking at the Eastern Defense Summit earlier in December, Capt. Andrew Campen, engineering service division lead official at the Coast Guard Command, Control, Communication, Computer, Cyber and Intelligence Service Center, said understanding and protecting data is the more important part of implementing zero trust. Securing health records, financial data, personnel data and other kinds of data would allow the service to make better decisions, he added.

According to Rear Adm. Chad Jacoby, assistant commandant for acquisitions and chief acquisition officer of the Coast Guard, properly implementing zero trust requires the service to solve some problems, including workstation architecture, operational technology, end-user devices and the IT environment, National Defense Magazine reported Tuesday.

The service’s desire to adopt zero trust effectively follows the creation of a cyber protection team in August to identify threats to the Marine Transportation System. 

The 2003 Cyber Protection Team is the third of its kind developed by Coast Guard Cyber to provide assessment, threat hunting and incident response capabilities to the MTS, which the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency identified as a part of the critical transportation systems sector.