The missing piece of your Zero Trust strategy: A unified data layer

Deploying a Zero Trust  architecture across an organization is complex, especially for large enterprises and critical infrastructure. These environments often rely on diverse and legacy systems, requiring significant resources and expertise to integrate ZT principles effectively.

Agencies operate across diverse environments, from on-prem data centers to multiple cloud services and providers — some managed internally, others externally. Navigating these hybrid infrastructures while maintaining security, interoperability, and visibility adds significant complexity.

Many federal government agencies rely on decades-old infrastructure that wasn’t designed with Zero Trust principles in mind. Legacy IT systems struggle to keep up, lacking scalability, speed, and cross-environment support.

Zero Trust inherently limits access based on user roles, which can sometimes be perceived as a barrier to collaboration and productivity. Organizations must ensure security policies remain effective to prevent unauthorized access without restricting employees’ ability to perform their work.

Each Zero Trust pillar generates data in different formats, often stored in silos without interoperability. This lack of unified data makes it difficult to monitor and analyze risks holistically. Manually correlating data across disparate systems slows down threat detection and incident response.

Many vendors sell separate security tools that should be integrated into a comprehensive solution. This leads to a disconnected user experience, higher security risks, and inefficiencies in data protection.

A successful Zero Trust strategy depends on an organization’s ability to see and secure all its data. Seamless information discovery enhances user experience, while real-time monitoring, resilient storage, and unified security visibility strengthen defenses. By integrating these elements, agencies can balance security with efficiency and maintain a proactive security posture.

Agencies must overcome complex legacy environments, usability concerns, data silos, and interoperability issues while ensuring compliance with federal mandates. For instance, in the example of critical infrastructure, Zero Trust adoption must be seamless to avoid service disruptions.

To address these barriers, public sector organizations should:

• Take a phased approach to implementation, focusing on high-risk areas first

• Invest in tools for consolidation that provide cross-platform visibility and real-time analytics

• Ensure Zero Trust policies that enhance security without disrupting essential operations

Typically, organizations purchase security products for two reasons: to reduce risk and to optimize costs. However, there’s more to consider beyond just these factors. Effective security requires not only the right tools but also a strategy that ensures efficiency, scalability, and a strong return on investment.

Elastic supports public sector agencies worldwide in their Zero Trust strategies by offering a unified data layer that connects isolated data, enabling faster, easier, and more secure access to critical information, regardless of format or location, all without requiring centralization.

By combining the precision of search with the intelligence of AI, Elastic connects data silos for real time insights, analysis, and automated actions that strengthen operational resilience, mitigate cybersecurity risks, and improve public sector operational efficiency.

For US federal agencies, the Elastic data mesh powers the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) dashboard, enabling multiple US federal agencies to obtain a unified view of security threats and patterns without transferring data ownership to a central repository. This capability is vital for projects where data visibility is necessary but ownership is distributed.

One public sector customer needed a unified view across two data centers, each generating 2.5 terabytes of security data per day. Their initial plan was to replicate all data, doubling storage costs. However, with Elastic’s cross-cluster search, they eliminated the need for replication, drastically reducing infrastructure complexity and costs. Now, they can access a single pane of glass view from either data center — without duplicating data.

• Tool consolidation: A single, unified platform for search, security, observability, and analytics

• Storage costs savings: Enables frozen tier storage for cost-effective long-term data retention, without sacrificing searchability

• Open, transparent, and flexible: Built on an open source foundation, offering flexibility and adaptable licensing to avoid dependence on a single provider

• Integration capabilities: Seamlessly integrates with third-party tools and large language models (LLMs) for compatibility with existing systems

• Cost-effective scaling: Designed for easy scalability to meet growing data needs, making it suitable for businesses of all sizes

• Comprehensive support: Offers a wealth of support resources, including detailed documentation, training programs, and active community forums

Elastic helps public sector organizations secure critical data, improve operational resilience, and streamline compliance efforts. 

Ready to learn more? Watch our webinar: The missing piece of your Zero Trust strategy.

Explore additional Zero Trust resources:

• Deep dive into the Elastic Search AI Platform

• For further reading and hands-on workshops, visit Elastic Security Labs. 

• If you are starting with your Zero Trust strategy, check out: What is Zero Trust?

• White paper: Does your Zero Trust strategy have a unified data access layer?

• Blog: Elastic provides the foundation for the DoD's pillars of Zero Trust Networking

• Blog: Querying a petabyte of cloud storage in 10 minutes

• Start your journey with Elastic today with a 14-day free trial

The release and timing of any features or functionality described in this post remain at Elastic's sole discretion. Any features or functionality not currently available may not be delivered on time or at all.