Episode 9 - Federal Cyber Defense: Legacy Debt, Cloud Shifts, and Network Truth

Richard Bejtlich sits down with Jean Schaffer, Corelight’s Federal CTO, to discuss the unique hurdles facing government agencies in an era of escalating state-sponsored threats. Jean highlights the persistent challenge of legacy IT infrastructure and the "technical debt" that complicates modernization efforts across the Department of Defense, the intelligence community, and the civilian sector. The conversation explores the strategic shift toward cloud adoption as a means to decommission vulnerable on-premise hardware and the evolving "whole of nation" defense strategy that requires deeper public-private partnerships. Jean also offers her perspective on the risks and rewards of open-source software in government environments, emphasizing the importance of code provenance. Finally, they delve into why Zero Trust architectures still require robust network telemetry as a foundational element to verify that security policies are actually working in the real world.