Air Force seeks information on zero trust gateways

The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center is seeking information relating to rebuilding and replacing data center and Air Force base security stacks to support the service’s Zero Trust Strategy, according to an online posting of the request.

The service is not looking for detailed plans, according to the information request, but product offering descriptions and examples of a business’ past experiences with zero-trust gateways, or ZTGs.

An enterprise protection suite for ZTG would be expected to function at high speeds, leverage Identity Credential Access Management and work with other government-provided services.

Among other requirements, products would need to:

• Be designed for Component Enterprise Data Centers (CEDC) Security Stacks and Zero Trust Protection Suites;
• Separate CEDC from the base network while providing direct connection to customer edge routers, such as service delivery points;
• Create and extend security for a minimum of five zones;
• Be capable of automatic fail-over to a secondary CEDC;
• Have policy decision point and policy enforcement point solutions for hosted applications;
• Transfer data between CEDCs at high speeds;
• Be interoperable between ZTGs installed at Enterprise IT-as-a-Service bases and Air Force Network;
• Allow for a scalable system capable of five years of data backup and log storage;
• Be capable of micro-segmentation to isolate workloads for secure lateral movement.

The Air Force has about 800,000 users on its network, and larger bases can have up to 35,000 users, according to the post, so the ability for a vendor to scale any products should be included in the response.

Businesses should indicate whether they are interested in submitting a proposal once a request is released, what military contracts they hold and whether they are considered large or small businesses by the Small Business Association’s standards. Responses should not exceed 10 pages.

Responses are due Nov. 2.