Fireside Chat: Building ZTA Federal Compliance for the Data Pillar

As cyber threats continue to evolve, protecting federal data assets is more critical than ever. Traditional perimeter-based security models are no longer sufficient in an era of sophisticated cyber adversaries and mission-critical threats. The federal government is leading the charge in modernizing cybersecurity through M-21-31 and M-22-09 with the adoption of Zero Trust architecture (ZTA) - a paradigm shift mandated by Executive Order 14028 and reinforced by NIST recommendations. Our featured speaker is John Grovenstein—a U.S. Marine and a 20+ year veteran of the National Institutes of Health. John has dedicated his career to scientific computing, with a deep expertise in High-Performance Computing environments. As a leading expert at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), John has been at the forefront of building and managing one of the first HHS scientific research environments to achieve Zero Trust Architecture– Data Pillar compliance. He shares his experience navigating the unique challenges of securing massive volumes of unstructured scientific data while maintaining performance, scalability, and operational efficiency. Joining John is Carmelo, CTO and a key collaborator in this effort. Together, they walk you through how the NIH is seeing substantial gains in performance and data sharing using a global namespace and the Vast Data Platform—a strategy that’s enabling secure, efficient, and scalable infrastructure consolidation, while maximizing the value of shared metadata across the globe achieving operationally ready secure AI/ML. Whether you are already implementing Zero Trust or just starting, you will gain actionable strategies to strengthen your ZTA data security and protect against evolving threats.