Dell Technologies will open the Zero Trust Center of Excellence to provide a secure data center for organizations to test configurations and validate zero-trust use cases. The company also introduced new cybersecurity advisory services to help smooth the adoption hurdles.

Adopting zero-trust principles across multicloud and edge environments is no easy task. Dell intends to serve as a catalyst to help customers achieve zero-trust outcomes by taking “the integration burden and the friction off the hands of the customers,” Dell Technologies Global CTO John Roese said.

“Zero trust is hard, and it's not something that any one vendor is going to be able to necessarily push the industry to completion with, so we're partnering,” he added.

The company worked with Maryland Innovation Security Institute (MISI) and CyberPoint International to open a zero trust center next spring at DreamPort, the U.S. government’s cybersecurity innovation facility.

The Zero Trust Center of Excellence is designed to allow organizations to test configurations based on the Department of Defense Zero Trust Reference Architecture before deployment into their own environments.

“The idea behind it is that the US government arguably is a head of the commercial enterprise in defining things like the controls necessary for zero trust to happen. In fact, they have about 130 controls identified to describe known good behavior and to meet the zero trust objectives they have,” Roese explained.

By working with the governments and other partners, Dell plans to integrate more products and help the ecosystem work together, and then turn those experiences into reference architectures and a repeatable blueprint for the zero-trust architecture integration and orchestration to help customers advance their journey, he noted.

“It's in everyone's interest to share our learnings about the right way to implement zero trust, how to get identity policy and threat management tools working to achieve certain business controls, how to do the integration, where the integration friction is, how to overcome it, and all that type of work will happen at this Zero Trust Center of Excellence starting early next year,” Roese said.

Many organizations are facing the challenges of a complicated architecture shift to adopt zero-trust principles. Dell claims it wants to help via its new security advisory services that provide a zero-trust roadmap building on customers’ existing security assets.

As part of the advisory services, Dell introduced a new vulnerability management service that includes regular vulnerability scanning, patching prioritization, and exposure assessment by Dell experts.

Roese noted the services target a wide market with various cost points. For smaller-sized customers, “we have services that are at much lower cost and pre-point where we can go look for blind spots and give them some very common technologies to get started, [such as] next-generation antivirals, MDR,” and data protection in multicloud.

Dell also offers more advanced services building on those basic security practices and giving customers additional guidance on their zero-trust journey.

“There's a big request for help because this is difficult, but it's also something every customer we talked to wants to make progress on,” Roese said, referring to a huge demand for zero-trust adoption.