Supporting Multi-Cloud Identity Across the Department of Defense
The Pentagon on Wednesday announced Google, Oracle, Amazon, and Microsoft as the awardees of the new cloud architecture called the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), which will service across all of the Department of Defense’s (DoD) security domains and classification levels.
The driving force behind this multi-cloud, multi-vendor era is the need to push technology to address the DoD unique missions, and to repair gaps in secure access to data at the speed of relevance.
Surprisingly, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) complicates this trend.
Fully embrace mission elasticity with neutral identity
A main benefit of deploying and implementing a multi-cloud strategy is the increase in options when selecting vendors. However, when IaaS are purpose-built to be sticky, organizations and their hard-to-fill cybersecurity teams struggle to figure out how to seamlessly integrate with other applications without putting data privacy and protection at risk.
With Okta for US Military, our Impact Level 4 (IL4) conditional Provisional Authorization (PA), the overhead of managing identity with multiple clouds becomes a manageable effort. This ease comes from Single Sign-On (SSO) and other vendor-neutral, identity-powered security capabilities, as well as centralized log management performance.
All too often, IaaS vendors tailor their infrastructure and Identity logs to use non-standard naming conventions. As multi-cloud practitioners ourselves, we know the struggle this creates.
Non-standard cloud logging is one of the major reasons open source tools exist (e.g. Splunk Common Information Model and the Elastic Common Schema). These data normalization standards are intended to create a common view of mismatched data. Utilizing Okta as the common identity solution, all logs will be consistent across all cloud services.
If cloud is energy, identity is critical infrastructure
The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Hosting and Compute Center (HaCC) — the enterprise provider for JWCC — describes cloud as “stored up data energy.”
To deliver cloud speed and energy to the warfighter, users, assets, and resources have become the new security perimeter rather than physical boundaries and firewalls. Any investments in Zero Trust must account for identity.
Identity is the critical infrastructure that connects the DoD and its approved mission partners to vital mission applications.
Visit okta.com/dod to learn more about how Okta reduces Identity, Credential, and Access Management (ICAM) challenges so our defense customers can focus on mission excellence.
