Zero trust becoming mainstream, says CyberCX's Andrew Bedford

In January, Gartner in the US claimed that zero trust cybersecurity was “top of mind for most organisations as a critical strategy to reduce risk,” but “few organisations have actually completed zero-trust implementations.”

Despite support for a zero trust approach, it can be hard to deliver in organisations “culturally disposed towards providing broad access,” notes CRN Australia’s 2023 State of Security report.

Still, Gartner predicted that by 2026, 10 per cent of large enterprises would have a “mature and measurable zero trust program in place.”

One company seeing traction with zero trust cybersecurity is CyberCX.

CyberCX Chief Customer Officer Andrew Bedford spoke to CRN Australia in September at Zscaler’s 2023 Partner Summit and Awards Ceremony in Sydney, where he said there was a “fantastic opportunity to help clients on their frameworks that they’re working through.”

“SASE was a real challenge, zero trust was a real challenge to talk about a couple of years ago. It's now becoming mainstream. We're now seeing huge amount of customer demand coming in and driving that outcome," Bedford said.

CyberCX is three years into its partnership with zero trust-based cybersecurity company Zscaler. What started as “a few deployments” has “grown significantly over the last few years and really helping customers right through the organisation across Australia and New Zealand,” Bedford said.

“Whether we’re supporting federal government agencies, when we're providing the top end of enterprise, or when we're supporting right through our business segmentation and corporate segmentation, we've got use cases with Zscaler right through the stack.”

A zero trust fabric is "key to everything that [customers] do across all of their environments,” Bedford said. “It’s really resonating with customers.”

This includes customers “with a broad spectrum of access points or a dispersed network of infrastructure” and customers with a mobile workforce. “Frictionless and seamless access to network is key,” Bedford said.

That helped CyberCX earn the Zscaler Momentum Partner of the Year award in September for “going above and beyond in dedicating resources to drive sales to a number of customers.”

Also earning Zscaler Partner awards were Partner of the Year Telstra, Service Innovation Partner of the Year Instillery, Solution Provider of the Year Optus and Creative Partner of the Year Sekuro.

Investment required for successful deployments

In the US, adoption of zero trust cybersecurity will be helped by a directive earlier this year by the US Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which told US government agencies that management interfaces could only remain accessible from the internet if they implement a zero trust architecture "in alignment with OMB M-22-09, NIST 800-207, the TIC 3.0 capability catalog, and CISA's zero trust maturity model."

Australian organisations cited for moving to a zero trust cybersecurity model include research and education network provider AARNet.

Karl Soderlund, Zscaler Senior Vice President, Worldwide Partners and Alliances, put the services opportunity for partners into three categories: advisory, deployment services and managed services.

Speaking to CRN Australia, Soderlund saw opportunities with customers that are going through digital transformation and “looking at their environment.” Financial services, retail and healthcare industries were “really hot” verticals.

Zscaler’s strategy isn’t mass partner recruitment. “This is an elegant technology that takes investment to really be successful with the deployments. So we’re looking for the best partners globally, but a small subset,” Soderlund said.

The company recently announced a partnership with CrowdStrike and Imprivata to deliver a zero trust cybersecurity solution for medical organisations.

Zscaler integrates with the Imprivata Digital Identity Platform and can take Imprivata context and leverage the existing integration with CrowdStrike Falcon Zero Trust Assessment (ZTA) to control access to applications with risk-based policies.