Technology executives at federal agencies and service branches said organizations should come up with security strategies to address vulnerabilities as edge computing becomes more viable driven by advancements in cloud, 5G, internet of things and other tech platforms, Federal News Network reported Wednesday.
Alma Cole, chief information security officer at the Customs and Border Protection, said CBP is investing in zero trust-based technologies to address security risks as it processes more data from monitoring systems onsite.
“We’re no longer [limited to] ‘either you’re trusted and you’re on the network’ or ‘you’re off the network.’ Now we’re doing more micro segmentation in the cloud and other areas in [software-defined networking] where we can more and more comply to connect,” Cole said. “We’re really just changing the face of everything we do to push that data out to the edge where it’s needed in the most efficient way possible.”
Frank Konieczny, chief technology officer of the U.S. Air Force, discussed at a webinar Tuesday the need to process the collected data on the spot instead of transmitting the data back to a central computing location for analysis.
“The idea is always wherever you gather the data is where you want to process the data. And I think that as we go to a more 5G relevant communications technology, the data is going to stream infaster than we had before,” Konieczny said. “And there’s no way of actually moving the data down to production network to some centralized computing facility. You really need to process that mostly where it’s located. And I think everybody’s going to go that route, especially when we have smaller devices now, and we have more power than we ever had.”