Transcript
I worked in cybersecurity for 17, and I would say at the mark of the 15 year is where I really started looking at a zero-trust type of strategy. I was born in Brooklyn, New York. I'd grown up on zero-trust. If someone asked me for directions, I'd ask them who, what, when, and how. That's just my mantra of growing up in New York City, you never trust anyone. At the time of the pandemic, we had to innovate very quickly to ensure that students don't miss a beat when it came to instruction. The scale is always the biggest challenge of trying to touch different devices and people, not just to students, but also administrators, because this was a new world for them. ZSky has been a great partner with us helping solve some of those challenges, but also bringing them to a world of zero-trust. We started off utilizing ZIA in a very traditional manner. It was to look at the network traffic and do content filtering for our devices while we're on-prem. We went from just blocking websites and content and URLs to actually a full-on network security solution. And for me, that's where our journey really started. Second tool that we utilize is ZPA, which we use as a placement for VPN. We're looking to expand that use case, and now we're looking into applications and how we utilize applications, how we utilize data, and move forward into our zero-trust journey. Fast forward, after the pandemic, we worked with ZSky and started utilizing ZDX to get that visibility, to see how the devices are working. We utilize ZDX to maintain and monitor our Chromebook fleet, as well as our iPads, because those are remote learning devices. We found lots of network issues that we found out in our environment, as well as DNS issues that we were able to solve. So ZDX has opened up the world to us, not just from a security perspective, but from a network performance perspective as well. ZSky offered so much to us and was able to do things at scale and speed that we were unable to accomplish before then. So we've seen a decrease in attacks, I'd say probably about 15%, but we also see an increase of things blocking by 40%. So AI, I'm concerned about the usage of it, but I also love the innovation of it. Figuring out how students are actually using AI and what they're using it for will be great for us, but not just the students, but employees, how employees are using AI, which AIs are they using, why are they using them, and where they're getting from will be great from a DOE perspective to understand what we're doing with AI, and I think ZSky can be a good partner there to help us find out the answers to those questions. ZSky is a company to help us move faster, quicker when it comes to incident response, finding that needle in the haystack, threat hunting, and proactively finding threats to our network and our customers and our identities and our data, not just DOE, but all customers.
