Raising the bar for cybersecurity education: Announcing the new CSA Zero Trust Advancement Center

IT leaders seeking to learn zero trust best practices have had to navigate an ocean of competing vendor claims: Some cybersecurity marketers have used the term to describe non-zero trust solutions, leading to industry confusion. With muddled standards, inconsistent curricula, and unclear educational end goals, the metaphorical skills development seas have been rough.

Today, those waters calm. The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) has established the CSA Zero Trust Advancement Center, the new industry standard program for zero trust education. Zscaler is proud to be a founding organization of the CSA Zero Trust Advancement Center, joining other founding organizations Okta and CrowdStrike. The CSA Zero Trust Advancement Center provides comprehensive zero trust education via programs that explain Zero Trust strategy, application, and deployment in a vendor-agnostic context.

This is about more than creating a new school for zero trust. Zero trust presents the modern enterprise's best hope for data protection and threat prevention. The CSA Zero Trust Advancement Center serves as a new “north star” for evangelizing to and educating IT and business stakeholders looking to implement zero trust principles into business planning, enterprise architecture design, and solution deployment. The new program’s official mission is to “create research, training, professional credentialing, and provide an online center for additional curated zero trust resources.” This is strategic for both Zscaler and the broader cybersecurity industry at large: It will lead to better zero trust deployments, greater enterprise risk reduction, and improved standardization of zero trust service delivery.

Zscaler is proud to be the founding charter member of the Cloud Security Alliance. The non-profit Cloud Security Alliance was formed to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within Cloud Computing and provide education on the uses of Cloud Computing to help secure all other forms of computing.

Zscaler is also proud to partner with Okta and CrowdStrike in support of the new CSA Zero Trust Advancement Center. In the same way we partner with the two companies to apply our respective technology solutions to secure the new enterprise way of work, today we partner to build the future of zero trust education.

In establishing the CSA Zero Trust Advancement Center, the CSA in partnership with Zscaler, Okta, and CrowdStrike has taken an important first step towards standardizing curriculum that will help IT leaders deploy revolutionary zero trust architectures in their organizations. It will supplement the groundbreaking work of the CSA CxO Trust program, an initiative launched to elevate the knowledge of cloud computing and cybersecurity among organizational executive teams and governing bodies. 

Today’s announcement is only the beginning:

• Resources will grow to include zero trust strategy courseware, architectural classes, whitepapers, research analyses, case studies, curated third-party materials, and a community of zero trust experts ready to support zero trust learning.
• Join me on April 20th for the Zscaler CXO Summit, "Zero Trust: Prepare. Protect. Defend." I’ll sit down with Cloud Security Alliance Co-founder and CEO Jim Reavis for a session titled, “Cloud Security: Our Shared Responsibility." (And yes, we’ll talk at length about new CSA Zero Trust Advancement Center programs.)
• IT leaders can leverage roadshow resources and attend upcoming regional-chapter events.
• Executives will be able to pursue the CSA Zero Trust Advancement Center’s dynamic Zero Trust Strategy Courses, offered in partnership with the CSA’s CxO Trust working group.
• CISOs, CTOs, and architects will appreciate new credentialing programs to be made available in the coming months, including a CSA Certification of Zero Trust Knowledge.
• Mark your calendar for the CSA Zero Trust Summit, to be held later this calendar year.

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