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Tag: zero trust

  • Kasm and Everfox Partner on Cross-Domain Workspace Access for Defense

    Kasm and Everfox Partner on Cross-Domain Workspace Access for Defense

    Kasm Technologies and Everfox announced a strategic technology partnership on August 20, 2026, combining Kasm Workspaces — a container-based platform that streams desktops and applications to users in disposable, policy-controlled sessions — with Everfox’s Trusted Thin Client, a purpose-built zero-trust endpoint for accessing networks at different security classification levels. The joint solution, available now, targets government, defense, and intelligence agencies that today issue multiple devices or run parallel virtual-desktop stacks to keep classified networks separated.

    Executive Summary

    The announcement pairs two specialized vendors around one problem: giving cleared personnel access to applications and desktops across multiple classification levels from a single device. In classified environments, networks at different levels (for example, unclassified versus secret) are deliberately kept apart, which historically means separate computers, separate virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) stacks, and the cost and desk clutter that come with them. Everfox contributes the cross-domain access layer — its Trusted Thin Client bridges those separated networks on validated hardware — while Kasm contributes the workspace layer, streaming containerized desktops and applications into ephemeral sessions that are centrally managed and fully wiped when they end, so no data persists on the endpoint.

    The companies emphasize that adoption does not require a rip-and-replace: Kasm Workspaces integrates with existing hypervisors, cloud environments, and identity providers, letting agencies layer modern workspace delivery onto current infrastructure and migrate at their own pace. The announcement is a technology partnership with immediate availability, but it names no customers, contract values, or accreditation milestones — it establishes a joint offering, not demonstrated adoption.

    The Economics of Endpoint Sprawl

    The clearest business case in this release is cost consolidation. In many classified settings, working across networks means a physical computer per classification level on each desk, or a separate VDI environment per network — each with its own licensing, patching, and support burden. The release frames the joint solution as a direct replacement for these “multi-endpoint, multi-VDI-stack approaches,” collapsing them into one validated device and one workspace platform. If the technology performs as described, the savings show up not just in hardware counts but in operational overhead: fewer stacks to patch, fewer images to maintain, and central policy enforcement instead of per-device configuration.

    That said, the release quantifies none of this. There are no cost-comparison figures, seat counts, or reference deployments, so the economic argument rests on the general premise that fewer endpoints and fewer parallel stacks cost less — plausible, but unproven in this document.

    Containers as a Challenger to Legacy VDI

    The more interesting technical bet is architectural. Traditional VDI runs each user a full virtual machine, which is resource-heavy and rigid. Kasm’s model instead streams desktops and applications from containers — lightweight, fast-starting software packages — into browser-delivered sessions that exist only for the duration of use and are destroyed at termination. In security terms, ephemerality is a feature: a session that is fully wiped leaves no residual data on the endpoint, which matters enormously when the endpoint touches multiple classification levels.

    Defense environments, however, are conservative adopters for good reason. Cross-domain solutions face some of the most demanding assurance expectations in government IT, and the release does not address how the combined stack is accredited or evaluated for cross-domain use — only that Everfox’s hardware is “validated” and its solutions are “purpose-built” for high-assurance environments. Whether container isolation plus a trusted thin client satisfies each agency’s specific approval processes is the question that will actually determine adoption, and it is not answered here.

    The No-Rip-and-Replace Pitch

    Both companies clearly understand their buyer. Agencies running classified missions cannot take infrastructure offline for a wholesale migration, so the release leans hard on incrementalism: Kasm integrates with existing hypervisors, clouds, and identity providers, and agencies can “transition at a pace that does not put critical missions at risk.” Kasm’s chief product officer, Daniel Ben-Chitrit, also stresses the absence of vendor lock-in and the platform’s on-premise deployment model — both sensitive points for government buyers wary of dependency on any single supplier or on commercial cloud availability.

    Strategically, the partnership is complementary rather than overlapping: Everfox gets a modern desktop-delivery story to pair with its cross-domain plumbing, and Kasm gets a credentialed route into classified networks it could not plausibly enter alone. The risk cuts the other way too — a technology partnership without disclosed go-to-market commitments, joint contract vehicles, or named integrator support can remain a datasheet exercise. The release states the joint solution is available now, which is a stronger claim than a roadmap announcement, but availability and adoption are different things.

    Background

    Kasm Technologies builds an open-core platform for streaming containerized desktops, browsers, and applications to users through the web browser — a container-based alternative to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), the long-standing enterprise approach of hosting each user’s desktop as a virtual machine in a data center. Everfox operates in the cross-domain solutions market, supplying trusted access and secure data transfer between networks at different classification levels for government, defense, and intelligence customers, where high-assurance requirements have historically favored purpose-built hardware and specialized vendors.

    The partnership lands amid a broader government push to modernize classified-environment IT, where the default pattern of one endpoint per network has become an acknowledged cost and usability burden. It also extends a run of alliance announcements from Kasm, which recently shipped Kubernetes support in Workspaces 1.19 and a stealth-networking integration with Dispersive, suggesting a deliberate strategy of pairing its workspace layer with specialized security partners rather than building those capabilities alone.

    Source: Kasm Technologies and Everfox Announce Strategic Partnership to Deliver Secure Cross Domain Workspace Access for Government and Defense — PR Newswire press release, August 20, 2026, announcing the joint containerized cross-domain workspace solution.

  • New National Security Memorandum Orders Hardened Cybersecurity for Military Systems

    New National Security Memorandum Orders Hardened Cybersecurity for Military Systems

    President Trump has signed a National Security Memorandum aimed at strengthening the cybersecurity of U.S. military and intelligence systems, according to a June 14, 2026 report from Homeland Security Today. The directive targets the government’s most sensitive networks — the classified and mission systems that fall outside the rules governing ordinary civilian federal IT.

    Details of the memorandum’s specific requirements, deadlines, and funding were not included in the source report, so the scope of the mandate beyond its stated goal — hardened defenses for military and intelligence systems — remains to be confirmed from the document itself.

    Executive Summary

    A National Security Memorandum (NSM) is a presidential directive used to steer national security policy across the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. This one, per the Homeland Security Today report, orders a strengthening of cybersecurity for military and intelligence systems — the category the government formally calls national security systems, which operate under their own rulebook separate from civilian agency networks.

    The announcement matters for two reasons. First, national security systems carry the country’s most consequential data — weapons control, intelligence collection, command and control — and are the highest-value targets for state-sponsored attackers. Second, presidential directives in this space tend to cascade outward: past directives of this kind translated into binding technical requirements for agencies and, eventually, into procurement obligations for the contractors and infrastructure providers that build and host these systems.

    What is not yet clear is how prescriptive this memorandum is. The public reporting available at publication confirms the signing and the goal, but not the mechanisms — whether it sets new technical baselines, new deadlines, new reporting duties, or new authorities. That distinction will determine whether this is a significant operational shift or a reaffirmation of existing policy.

    What a National Security Memorandum Can Actually Do

    Presidential directives come in different weights. Executive orders on cybersecurity, such as the landmark 2021 order on improving the nation’s cybersecurity, generally bind civilian agencies. National security systems — networks handling classified information or supporting military and intelligence missions — are deliberately carved out and governed through separate instruments, with the National Security Agency serving as the designated national manager for their security. An NSM is the standard vehicle for directing change in that classified domain, which is exactly why this format was used here.

    The practical effect of an NSM depends on its plumbing: whether it directs specific agencies to issue binding operational directives, sets measurable deadlines, and assigns oversight. The 2022 memorandum known as NSM-8, for example, gave national security systems concrete timelines for adopting multifactor authentication and encryption and required agencies to report cross-domain systems to the NSA. If the new memorandum follows that pattern, agencies and their contractors will see enforceable requirements; if it is primarily a statement of priorities, its effect will depend on follow-on implementation guidance.

    Why Military and Intelligence Networks Are a Distinct Problem

    Hardening national security systems is a different engineering challenge from securing ordinary enterprise IT. These environments include air-gapped classified enclaves, decades-old weapons platforms that cannot simply be patched, and cross-domain solutions that move data between networks of different classification levels — each a specialized attack surface. The Department of Defense has been pursuing a zero trust architecture, a security model that assumes no user or device is trusted by default, with a stated target of implementation across the department by fiscal 2027. A new presidential directive landing in mid-2026 arrives squarely in the execution window of that effort.

    The threat context is well established even where this memorandum’s text is not. State-sponsored intrusion campaigns against U.S. defense networks and defense industrial base companies have been publicly documented by U.S. agencies for years, and the compromise of contractors — rather than the classified networks themselves — has repeatedly proven to be the softer entry point. Any serious hardening directive has to reckon with that supply chain reality, which is why observers will look closely at whether this NSM extends obligations to contractors and cleared cloud providers.

    Follow the Procurement: Who Stands to Gain

    Directives of this kind reliably move money, even when they arrive without new appropriations. Requirements for stronger identity controls, encryption modernization, network segmentation, and continuous monitoring translate into demand for the vendors that supply those capabilities — and into compliance burdens for the defense contractors that must meet them. Providers of classified-capable cloud regions, secure colocation, and accredited connectivity sit upstream of all of it: hardened systems still need hardened facilities, power, and network paths to run on.

    The cautionary note is timing. Federal cybersecurity mandates historically outpace the budgets attached to them, and implementation across the intelligence community and military services can stretch years past initial deadlines. Buyers and investors should treat the memorandum as a directional signal about sustained federal demand for defense-grade security infrastructure, not as a near-term revenue event — at least until implementing directives, budget requests, and contract vehicles make the requirements concrete.

    Background

    U.S. federal cybersecurity policy runs on two parallel tracks. Civilian agency networks answer to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and directives like the 2021 executive order on improving the nation’s cybersecurity, which mandated zero trust adoption and software supply chain standards. National security systems — the classified and mission networks of the military and intelligence community — follow a separate track: the 2022 directive NSM-8 extended equivalent-or-stronger standards to those systems and reinforced the NSA’s role as their national manager.

    The June 2026 memorandum continues a two-decade pattern of successive administrations tightening requirements on this second track as state-sponsored cyber operations against defense targets have escalated. For the infrastructure industry, that pattern has steadily expanded the market for defense-grade security: accredited cloud regions, secure facilities, encrypted connectivity, and the compliance regimes — such as CMMC for defense contractors — that govern who may build and operate systems touching sensitive government data.

    Source: Trump Signs National Security Memorandum to Strengthen Cybersecurity of Military and Intelligence Systems — Homeland Security Today report, June 14, 2026, on a presidential directive ordering hardened cybersecurity for U.S. military and intelligence systems.

  • NVIDIA Pushes Security Into Silicon: DOCA and the Agentic AI Factory

    NVIDIA Pushes Security Into Silicon: DOCA and the Agentic AI Factory

    NVIDIA published a technical blog on May 30, 2026 making the case for “in-silicon security” for agentic AI infrastructure, delivered through DOCA — the software framework for its BlueField data processing units (DPUs). The pitch: as AI systems shift from answering prompts to autonomously taking actions, the security controls protecting AI data centers should move out of host software and into dedicated hardware at the network edge of every server.

    Executive Summary

    The post positions DOCA, NVIDIA’s development framework for BlueField DPUs, as the security layer for what the company calls AI factories — data centers purpose-built to produce AI inference at scale. A DPU is a programmable processor that sits on the server’s network card and handles networking, storage, and security tasks so the CPU and GPU don’t have to. Running security there, rather than in the operating system, means the enforcement point survives even if the host itself is compromised.

    The timing tracks the industry’s pivot to agentic AI — systems that plan, call tools, and act on other systems with limited human supervision. That autonomy multiplies machine-to-machine traffic inside the data center and widens the blast radius of any single compromised workload, which is precisely the traffic that perimeter firewalls never see. NVIDIA’s argument is that the enforcement point has to move to where that east-west traffic actually flows: the server’s own network interface.

    It matters because NVIDIA is not a neutral party here. If security becomes a silicon feature of the AI stack, the company that already supplies the GPUs, the networking, and the DPUs consolidates one more layer of the platform. The blog is a technical argument, not a product launch — and readers should weigh it as both engineering guidance and strategic positioning.

    Agentic AI Breaks the Perimeter Model

    Traditional data center security assumes a hard shell and a soft interior: inspect traffic at the boundary, trust most of what happens inside. Agentic AI erodes that assumption. When autonomous agents call APIs, query databases, spin up jobs, and message other agents, the overwhelming majority of traffic is east-west — server to server inside the facility — and it is generated by software identities, not humans logging in.

    That shifts the useful control point from the perimeter to the individual server. Zero trust — the model in which no connection is trusted by default and every request is verified — has been the stated direction of enterprise security for years, but enforcing it on every packet between thousands of GPU servers is computationally expensive. NVIDIA’s framing of the DPU as the natural place to do that enforcement is a coherent answer to a real architectural problem, whatever one concludes about the specific product.

    Why the DPU Is an Attractive Security Boundary

    Putting security in the DPU buys two things. First, isolation: the DPU runs its own software stack, so firewalling, encryption, and telemetry keep operating even if an attacker gains root on the host — a meaningful property when the host is running semi-autonomous agents whose behavior is hard to fully predict. Second, offload: security processing done in dedicated silicon doesn’t consume the CPU cycles or GPU time that the facility exists to sell.

    That second point is the quiet economic argument. In an AI factory, every host cycle spent on packet inspection is margin lost. In-silicon security is thus pitched not only as safer but as cheaper per unit of useful work — an argument that will resonate with operators watching utilization dashboards. The trade-off is operational: security teams gain a new hardware layer to program, patch, and monitor, and DOCA skills are far scarcer than firewall administration skills.

    Platform Consolidation Cuts Both Ways

    For NVIDIA, embedding security into DOCA deepens an already formidable platform position spanning GPUs, interconnects, and networking. For buyers, that is simultaneously the appeal and the risk. A vertically integrated stack where security is co-designed with the fabric can genuinely outperform bolted-on alternatives; it also concentrates dependency on a single vendor for compute, networking, and now the control plane that polices both.

    Incumbent security vendors face a positioning question rather than immediate displacement: several already ship DPU-accelerated versions of their products, and the realistic outcome is DOCA as a substrate that third-party security software runs on, rather than a wholesale replacement. Infrastructure operators — including colocation and cloud providers hosting AI workloads — should read this as directional: the security perimeter of AI infrastructure is migrating into the server itself, and facility-level offerings will need to interoperate with it.

    Background

    NVIDIA transformed from a graphics chip maker into the dominant supplier of AI data center infrastructure, with its GPUs powering the large-scale model training and inference boom. Its 2020 acquisition of Mellanox brought high-performance networking in-house, yielding the BlueField DPU line and the DOCA framework introduced alongside it. Since then NVIDIA has steadily pitched a full-stack vision — compute, networking, software — for what it brands AI factories.

    The security angle gained urgency through 2025 and 2026 as enterprises moved from chatbot-style AI to agentic deployments, where autonomous software acts on live business systems. That shift has pushed the industry’s long-running zero-trust conversation from corporate networks into the AI cluster itself, making the question of where enforcement lives — perimeter, host, or silicon — a live architectural debate.

    Source: Advancing AI Infrastructure for Agentic AI with NVIDIA DOCA In-Silicon Security — NVIDIA Technical Blog post arguing for DPU-layer, in-silicon security as the foundation for agentic AI data centers.