Pentagon

The Defense Department’s top zero trust official is leaving government service at the end of this week, according to an email obtained by Nextgov/FCW.

Randy Resnick, who led development of the department’s framework for adopting the cybersecurity approach across its networks, will retire Friday, he told colleagues in the email sent late Tuesday night.

Resnick oversaw the Pentagon’s push to overhaul how it protects military networks and meet zero trust requirements by the end of fiscal 2027. The approach follows a “never trust, always verify” principle, assuming hackers may already be inside a network and limiting their access to sensitive data through continual verification and tighter controls.

He will continue work in the private sector at IGEL, a firm that makes secure software designed to help clients manage their computer systems from the cloud. He will serve as the company’s field chief technology officer for government and critical industries.

“Looking back at my career, I am filled with overwhelming gratitude to each one of you reading this email. When I first started in July 1987, I could never have envisioned the profound transformation the ‘Internet’ and the ‘Browser’ would bring — let alone that the rest of my career would be spent trying to secure it,” Resnick wrote in his email.

“But of all the chapters in my journey, the crown jewel has undoubtedly been serving as the Chief Zero Trust Officer for the DoW and leading the Zero Trust Portfolio Management Office (ZT PfMO) within the CIO office,” he said referring to the Chief Information Officer hub of the Defense Department, which the Trump administration refers to as the Department of War.

He joined the Pentagon’s CIO office in January 2022 after more than three decades at the National Security Agency. There, he served as the agency’s zero trust strategic lead and held senior positions in cybersecurity innovation and information assurance engineering. 

Resnick was also the first chief of the NSA’s Red Team, which used offensive cyber techniques to test defenses. While at NSA, he also helped develop two zero trust testbed labs in collaboration with the Defense Information Systems Agency and U.S. Cyber Command.

Today, NSA cyber analysts are widely using fast-evolving AI tools to test their network defenses.

GovExec Editor-in-Chief Frank Konkel contributed to this report.