Dell’s Project Fort Zero Passes DoD Muster

‘This could give channel partners a distinctive advantage in offering a solution that can simplify and accelerate zero-trust adoption, reduce the operational burden on organizations while delivering advanced protection against evolving cyberthreats,’ Project Fort Zero lead Herb Kelsey tells CRN via email.

Dell Technologies said its long-awaited end-to-end zero-trust framework Project Fort Zero gives partners a path to take share in cybersecurity with a validated design that has now passed a rigorous U.S. Department of Defense assessment.

“The benefit of an end-to-end zero-trust solution like Project Fort Zero is the high level of security that is built directly into the architecture,” Herb Kelsey, Project Fort Zero lead, told CRN via email this week. “It can reduce the complexities of integrating disparate technologies to achieve zero-trust maturity.”

For partners, Kelsey told CRN that once the design becomes generally available, which is expected soon, it will represent a massive opportunity to build a secure platform for their customers’ digital estates without the investment of time and expertise.

“This could give channel partners a distinctive advantage in offering a solution that can simplify and accelerate zero-trust adoption, reduce the operational burden on organizations while delivering advanced protection against evolving cyberthreats,” he said. “Zero-trust cloud is an opportunity worth tens of billions a year. This is especially important as enterprises seek to protect the data supporting their AI initiatives.”

Alex Rodriguez, head of strategies and partnerships at Dell Titanium partner Weaver Technologies in Fredericksburg, Texas, hailed the accomplishment as a turning point for solution providers who want to provide better security, but are frustrated integrating dozens of products that occupy the infrastructure environment. The value of Project Fort Zero lies in bringing order to that process, he said.

“The cybersecurity landscape is now crowded with numerous solutions and vendors. Almost every switch, firewall, and endpoint security vendor has an offering. For medium to large enterprise data center environments, I believe comprehensive managed solutions with integrated toolsets is the way to go," he told CRN via email. “I have had briefings with the Dell Security team and no doubt there are very highly skilled team members. As I stated above, the integration is hard and that is the innovation.”

Organizations entering the AI race are generating vast quantities of data, some of it sensitive and involving proprietary information. These designs give customers a turnkey zero-trust framework to protect that data from sophisticated threats while meeting the U.S. government’s push for robust security.

“This means customers can benefit from a complete framework that continuously verifies users, devices and applications, minimizing potential vulnerabilities,” Kelsey said.

This week Dell said that Project Fort Zero had completed all security controls needed to achieve the DoD’s validation as a sovereign, on-premises private cloud, Dell said. This third-party approval provides credibility to organizations that the offering was rigorously tested to help protect environments against cyberattacks, Dell stated.

Project Fort Zero was introduced in May 2023 at Dell Technologies World. At the time, Dell said the project is an ecosystem of more than 30 technology company partners that aims to satisfy the DoD’s zero-trust strategy. Back then that included meeting more than 150 security requirements laid down by the DoD in a step-by-step process.

In 2022, Dell unveiled its Zero Trust Center of Excellence at the U.S. Cyber Command’s cybersecurity innovation center, known as Dreamport. Dell is providing the facility with a secure data center to validate zero-trust use cases before they are deployed into live environments.

But this design is not just for massive government systems and enterprises, Kelsey told CRN. In fact, he said one of the benefits is how much it helps partners who want to meet the standards laid out in the DoD’s zero-trust framework but may not have the expertise on staff to create a zero-trust deployment or the resources to build it themselves.

“Project Fort Zero is designed to be accessible not only for governments and large enterprises but also for the midmarket range,” he said in the email. “One of its key advantages is its potential to reduce integration costs since it’s already an integrated zero- trust system. This eliminates the need for organizations to source and integrate multiple tools or depend heavily on scarce, highly skilled technical staff.”