Why Zero Trust is so important in healthcare and government sectors

Adopting and implementing a zero trust approach to security is critical to avoiding the type of major IT disruptions and massive data breaches that occurred during recent cyberattacks on healthcare, public health and government sectors, said Clinton McCarty, chief enterprise security officer and CISO at federal contractor National Government Services.

“The drive to move towards a zero trust architecture and recursive validation of those accessing our systems and networks brings us much closer to early detection and prevention,” he said.

“When it comes to the zero trust approach, it will take millions and millions and millions of dollars of investment across federal agencies to actually make that paradigm shift,” he said.

“But the more we talk about zero trust and how we can verify access points, data classification and the different pillars of the zero trust architecture, the more secure our assets will be.”

In this audio interview with Information Security Media Group (see audio link below photo), McCarty also discussed:

• Lessons learned from the Change Healthcare cyberattack;
• Important security issues for legacy IT systems;
• The importance of reliable information exchange on cyber threats between the healthcare, public health and public administration sectors.

McCarty has worked for the National Government Services for 15 years. He is responsible for securing and protecting the company’s internal and external data and data systems, and oversees asset and access management, operations and security management, IT service management, and the NGS enterprise data center. Prior to joining NGS, he worked as an independent information security consultant supporting the financial, biomedical, and biopharmaceutical sectors.