Security

Increasingly Complex Federal IT Environments Call for Multiple Security Tools

Agencies add specialized solutions to their portfolios to support hybrid workers.

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Ryan Petersen has worked in publishing for more than two decades, most of it spent creating award-winning content and strategy for CDW’s family of tech magazine brands. As editor-in-chief, he works with his team to develop compelling and useful industry-focused stories to share with the technology world. Outside of work, Ryan enjoys spending time with his children, traveling, online gaming, and following Iowa Hawkeye sports and Cubs baseball.

A recent survey by CDW found that 68% of organizations across industries use between 10 and 49 security tools or platforms in their cyberdefense matrix. The 2024 CDW Cybersecurity Research Report noted that agencies and other institutions use more solutions as IT security environments become more complex.

This tracks with our feature about the nascent Protective DNS Resolver Service developed by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. CISA officials say increasingly complex IT profiles are driving the growth of secure access service edge security solutions, which combine a software-defined WAN with a cloud-delivered security stack (see “Federal Agencies Refresh Devices to Support Changing Work Environments”). And in our roundtable discussion, federal cybersecurity leaders from CISA, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Education say multiple security tools are necessary to build defense-in-depth resources for an increasingly complex IT attack surface.

Roundtable participant Shelly Hartsook, CISA’s acting associate director for capacity building, tells FedTech that increasing decentralization of the federal workforce expands the potential attack surface for adversaries: “That’s driving the need for multiple cybersecurity capabilities, including tools that are often specific to the systems you’re protecting.”

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Authenticating Users Anywhere

Most executives surveyed by CDW also said that identity and access management tools are most effective in providing visibility into security operations. IAM solutions authenticate users, granting CISOs some validation that authorized users are accessing the appropriate resources and thus operating in a zero-trust security paradigm.

Zero trust, of course, ensures strict access controls and grants only the most basic level of privilege to authenticated users. SASE tools can help ensure zero-trust security by combining networking and security services into an integrated solution that authenticates all users, regardless of whether they are accessing assets on-premises or in the cloud.

With federal employees working in hybrid office environments and regularly using cloud services, the need for specialized tools to support specific functions becomes clear. And, so, the growth of security portfolios — to the point where roughly half of government IT leaders are using between 10 and 49 tools — is completely understandable. In fact, it’s a necessity.

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