Mississauga, ON — August 18, 2022 — Optiv, the cyber advisory and solutions leader, today announced it has been awarded the first major enterprise contract under Shared Services Canada’s (SSC) cybersecurity procurement vehicle (CSPV) for its network device authentication (NDA) solution, which aims to establish a collaborative environment to effectively manage device certificates across federal government IT infrastructure.

Today’s workforces and their devices are more distributed than ever, leading to a rapidly expanding threat landscape. Enterprises and governments alike must be able to proactively and jointly respond to emerging cyber threats, while also providing timely and appropriate access to trusted devices.

The first of its kind, Optiv Canada’s NDA solution is delivered in partnership with Venafi, the leader in securing machine identities, and Crypto4A, a next generation hybrid security platform, which manages the lifecycle of device keys for zero trust-based architectures. The combined offering allows Canada to move away from manual device management by leveraging automation to address the proliferation of interconnected devices.

“It’s estimated there will be nearly 1.5 million devices connected to the Government of Canada’s infrastructure at any one time within the next four years. A manual approach to network access is unsustainable and opens everyone up to operational and security risks,” said Optiv’s Cheryl McGrath, area vice president and country general manager, Canada. “Our NDA project provides a new set of infrastructure-wide solutions for device authentication, allowing for automated provisioning and the capacity to adapt without expensive hardware changes.”

“The realities of digital transformation mean that every organization, including governmental agencies, are facing unprecedented growth in the number of machines on their networks,” said Kevin Bocek, vice president, security strategy and threat intelligence at Venafi. “With this decision, the Canadian Federal Government is demonstrating their commitment to their vision of a strong machine identity management strategy which is essential to the security of the systems that underpin our digital world. This vision is not possible without a strong network device authentication program which is the cornerstone of identity and security.”

“We thank both Optiv and Venafi for the opportunity to add value to the NDA solution. We believe new approaches to providing secure access, authentication and verification of machine identities are required for the opportunities and challenges of digital transformation in zero-trust environments”, said John Scott, Chair and CEO of Crypto4A.

With NDA, Canada is laying a secure foundation for zero trust, network access control, enhanced compliance and an improved user experience. Optiv and its partners are looking to deliver for the Government of Canada the same objective-driven outcomes it does for clients in any other vertical of business and IT operations.

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