At Dell Technologies World 2023, the company announced plans to further its goals to be considered a “Switzerland” in organizing the zero-trust ecosystem. Today’s news introduces Project Fort Zero, which is built on its partnerships with more than 30 technology companies. Dell plans to get this zero-trust solution validated by the U.S. government to help add consistency and a way to quantify zero trust.

Herb Kelsey, industry CTO for government at Dell Technologies, noted this service aims to address the zero-trust hurdles that organizations are facing.

“As we interviewed our customers, what we determined was that one of the largest impediments that they had to adopt zero trust was that they weren't clear on when they could tell if they were done.," said Kelsey. "But they also understood that it was a large number of technologies and therefore a large number of vendors, and all of that created an integration burden that they just could not really handle."

Dell hopes to create a destination for zero trust that should include meeting the standards and getting validation from the Department of Defense (DoD), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the U.S. intelligence community.

"Our customer are certainly looking to the architectures and the standards that the U.S. government is putting out as a gold standard and something that they would value if a company could meet," Kelsey said.

To achieve validation, an NSA red team will evaluate the solution against DoD's Zero-Trust Reference Architecture. The solution will have to withstand an attack from the team, meet NIST controls, and display no glaring gaps in security controls and procedures. This process will take place later this year.

Once complete, Project Fort Zero will be designated by the government as meeting their advanced zero-trust criteria or their target criteria, Kelsey explained.

With a goal to reduce the integration burden, Dell's Project Fort Zero is designed to not only serve governments but also targets the commercial market globally, Kelsey said.

The solution can be helpful among large customers in regulated markets that require heightened security, small and medium businesses that lack the expertise to build a complete zero-trust environment, and public and private sector companies outside the U.S. seeking data sovereignty.

Additionally, Kelsey outlines three configurations — an enterprise, an edge, and a detached edge or tactical edge configuration. These can be employed in on-premises data centers, remote or regional locations like retail stores, and in the field where temporary implementations are needed in places with intermittent connectivity, according to Dell.

Last October, Dell announced plans to open the Zero Trust Center of Excellence to provide a secure data center for organizations to test configurations and validate zero-trust use cases  while introducing new cybersecurity advisory services to help smooth the adoption hurdles.

Later that month, Dell rolled out a suite of services called Identity & Endpoint Protection with Microsoft Zero Trust to integrate Dell’s security expertise with Microsoft security tools to protect its customers’ Microsoft ecosystems with zero-trust principles.

In April, the vendor unveiled its integration with more than 30 partners for zero-trust capabilities including Juniper Networks, Maryland Innovation Security Institute (MISI), Nvidia, Palo Alto Networks and VMware.