Elastic’s Chris Townsend says common data standards essential for zero trust success

Chris Townsend, Vice President of Public Sector at Elastic, discussed the operational challenges government agencies face in establishing a zero-trust environment at the 2025 Zero Trust Summit. He highlighted the need for data standardization across disparate tools to achieve a common operating picture. Townsend also cited the General Services Administration as an example of successful zero-trust implementation through common data standards. He emphasized the importance of indexing data once for multiple uses to avoid redundancy. In addition, Townsend mentioned Elastic’s contribution to the open telemetry project to facilitate data sharing and advanced analytics, including machine learning and generative AI.