Elodie Collins 
Ryan McArthur, federal chief technology officer at Zscaler, said industry must lean into automation and artificial intelligence to accelerate the government compliance process in increasingly complex IT environments.
In an interview with The Oakmont Group’s Federal Tech Podcast published Tuesday, the official spoke about how emerging technologies can potentially shorten the compliance timeline, especially as more cloud service providers enter the federal and defense markets.
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He noted that, right now, the government’s authorization process is very manual.
“They’re having to sit there and just read 50, 60-page [authorization recommendations] manually, and they’re having to do them on Excel sheets,” he stated. “And that’s untenable when you’re managing 140, 150 cloud service providers and you’re having to update consistently.”
What AI Capabilities Must Industry Adopt to Streamline Compliance?
McArthur, a retired U.S. Army chief warrant officer, said Zscaler and its competitors are looking into autonomous policy suggestions and enforcement and policy adjustments.
He also cited predictive autonomous incident response as a critical requirement. The official noted that AI is widely available, even to young hackers. He added that not only are predictive and autonomous incident detection and response capabilities needed, but they must also evolve quickly to keep pace with threats.
What Authorizations Have Zscaler Secured?
McArthur shared that Zscaler has achieved Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program Moderate and High and Department of War Impact Levels 2, 4 and 5 certifications. He added that the company is working toward achieving IL6, which covers classified information up to the secret level.
Zscaler also recently secured Level 2 certification under the Pentagon’s Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification, or CMMC, framework. CMMC Level 2 is awarded to companies that meet 110 security controls under the National Institute of Standards and Technology Special Publication 800-171 for protecting controlled unclassified information.
