ManTech International Uses Zero Trust to Achieve Both Innovation and Compliance

“We did a thorough comparison of the options,” says Todd Welsh, Executive Director of Zero Trust Engineering. “As a federal systems integrator, we have seen and deployed a lot of products. When we were looking to adopt a zero trust solution, we did a proof of concept with Netskope and several competitors. Netskope was the clear winner.”

One differentiator of Netskope’s ZTNA solution, Netskope One Private Access, was its service level agreement (SLA) for availability. “Netskope clearly knows their platform is more reliable because of the SLA,” Welsh says. “Also, at the time, Netskope was the only solution that could decrypt TLS 1.3, so we did not have to downgrade our security to deploy the tool.”

A high-confidence joint surveillance assessment performed by the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) proved that ManTech’s Private Access architecture is CMMC 2.0-compliant. “We showed the auditors how ManTech implemented zero trust, leveraging Netskope One SSE and Private Access as the core components of our policy decision points and policy enforcement points,” Beckman says. “ManTech was the first true zero trust infrastructure that they ever assessed, and it enabled us to obtain a flawless score of 110 out of 110.”

The audit was even sweeter because it progressed extremely smoothly. “The auditors said one portion of the CMMC assessment normally takes a day and a half to get through,” Welsh says. “We planned for that, then finished the entire assessment for that control point in 45 minutes. Netskope brought together all the relevant compliance data in a way that was easy to display to the auditors.”

ManTech is also using Netskope One Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for Endpoint on user devices, enhancing the IT team’s understanding of each device’s security posture. “The value we receive from Netskope, summed up in one word, is ‘visibility,’” Welsh says. “The Netskope One platform provides visibility to the endpoint and data in transit. That knowledge, in turn, enables us to make, finetune, and enforce effective policies.”

“The aspect of our partnership with Netskope that I am most excited about is the opportunity to take zero trust to our clients,” Beckman concludes. “Government agencies must implement zero trust, and many are scrambling to get the right solutions in place. ManTech exists at the nexus of AI and security, and we can show clients that these solutions are not just theoretical. We have implemented zero trust and can immediately translate the benefits to client environments.”