Rick Wagner, president of Microsoft Federal and six-time Wash100 Award winner, was featured in a new video interview with Executive Mosaic to shed light on Microsoft’s role on the Department of Defense’s Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract.
Wagner is part of the 2023 Wash100 class, and you can vote for him now in the Wash100 popular vote competition! Visit Wash100.com to cast your vote.
In the video, the first of four in a series that provides insights from all JWCC awardee companies, Wagner described what the contract win means to Microsoft and outlined the capabilities the company can bring to the enterprise-wide cloud effort.
Wagner also gave his thoughts on how cloud intersects with security, and how Microsoft deploys a “secure by design” approach to its capabilities and offerings.
Further into the cybersecurity conversation, Wagner spoke about the importance of knowing what’s on your network before trusting it, and he also outlined the three principles of zero trust. The first principle, verifying explicitly, states that every process, user and application should be verified and validated at every step.
From there, the second principle explains that each user should be assigned the least privilege necessary to execute their functions without compromising security. Lastly, Wagner said organizations should assume a breach has already occurred and bad actors are already on their networks.
But as organizations shift to a zero trust cybersecurity model, the challenge will be in the implementation, according to Wagner. Zero trust shifts the cybersecurity paradigm from a compliance-based model to an outcome-focused one, and it’s a method that requires continuous learning at all tiers of the organization.
Hear more of what Wagner had to say about cloud, zero trust and more by watching his full video interview here.