Getting to Know TIC 3.0: An Overview

What is TIC 3.0?

Trusted Internet Connection (TIC) 3.0 is needed now more than ever to strengthen cyber defenses in a world in which the network perimeter has become increasingly more amorphous, in alignment with guidance released by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

The transition to cloud and mobile environments, along with the increase in remote workers across the nation, heightens the need for cyber protection that can address agencies' distributed network requirements, including branch offices, remote users and service providers.

TIC 3.0 is a response to the need for improved agility, security, connectivity, and visibility in federal government networks that can improve network performance and manageability, improve cybersecurity, increase operational effectiveness and lay the foundation for implementing a Zero Trust strategy.

What's driving the need for TIC 3.0?  

As Federal agencies have adopted cloud, mobile and SaaS technologies as well as supported a larger remote workforce, their end users, applications and data increasingly live outside of the traditional agency network boundary. TIC 2.0 and previous iterations of network architectures have focused on securing a physical, hub-and-spoke agency network perimeter leading to network bandwidth constraints, lack of agility, a degraded end user experience and increasing costs.  

The TIC 3.0 initiative aims to provide a more modern approach to network security and a better end user experience, giving agencies more flexibility to enforce security capabilities outside the traditional agency perimeter in these dispersed environments.

TIC 3.0 building blocks

Federal agency IT and security teams need the right building blocks and tools to protect their systems as traditional network parameters disappear and threats increase as their TIC 3.0 journey continues.

Network connectivity is the foundational phase for agencies preparing for TIC 3.0. IT and security teams will need the right building blocks to accommodate a range of use cases. Operations teams will have to understand how network traffic and data transfers to and from remote offices and workers will perform in the new paradigm.

The TIC 3.0 experience with WWT

As federal agencies continue to rapidly expand their networks to meet new demands, they need an agnostic testbed for collaborative experimentation as they begin their journey from TIC 2.0 to TIC 3.0.

As CISA has communicated to agencies, their guidance released to-date on TIC 3.0 is meant to serve as a starting point for agencies to help set the foundation for TIC 3.0 uses cases that will be a way for agencies to sponsor pilots and work with vendors on TIC solutions.  

WWT has created a virtual environment specifically to address this need—to help them understand the differences between TIC 3.0 and previous iterations, along with why it is important to modernize—so that agencies can collaborate to design, build, educate and deploy customized lab environments specific to their agency requirements.

The TIC 3.0 Architecture Lab is a capability of the Advanced Technology Center (ATC) designed to demonstrate how TIC 3.0 optimizes the end user experience, compared to that of TIC 2.0, providing customers an environment to gain hands-on experience to evaluate new cloud and infrastructure solutions for their respective TIC use cases.  

The environment that supports the lab is a blend of physical and virtual infrastructure, purposely intended to highlight, and validate, the vast differences of prior TIC iterations and to create a realistic setting meant to help customers envision and evaluate their own TIC scenarios and flexible perimeters designed to protect diverse hosting platforms, improve security capabilities, optimize IT services and ensure secure access to critical resources—all within an environment-agnostic approach.  

With WWT's state-of-the-art TIC 3.0 Architectural Lab, agencies are able to better identify how TIC 3.0 can improve network performance and manageability, improve cybersecurity and increase operational effectiveness.

WWT's TIC 3.0 Architecture Lab allows customers the ability to:

• Test network designs and the capability of SD-WAN to securely connect with the public Internet and cloud providers.
• Work better remotely through the enablement of cloud adoption.
• Experiment with trusted gateways for reliable bandwidth to locations CONUS and OCONUS.
• Implement security in preparation for Zero Trust, across the entire data exchange from the laptop to branch offices, all the way to applications in the cloud.
• Perform testing on end-user devices to simulate a remote user connection to the agency's traditional network, cloud and the Internet.
• Access TIC use cases to review results for environments with security requirements like their own.
• Share and compare various TIC 3.0 solutions across agencies.

Benefits to federal agencies:

• Access to best-of-breed technology – Aligning the latest best-of-breed technologies and multi-vendor solutions with TIC 3.0 guidance will help agencies build a foundation for secure network access at the edge, and eventually transition to a Zero Trust architecture.
• Remote work flexibility – TIC 3.0 provides the flexibility necessary to enable remote workers as well as the unified communications and collaboration tools they need to remain productive.
• Improving IT modernization – TIC 3.0 can improve network performance and manageability, cybersecurity, and operational effectiveness for federal government IT modernization.
• Leveraging the lab – This state-of-the-art collaborative environment provides agencies access to a secure integrated space with the ability to test and evaluate emerging technologies, shared services and meet federal workforce expectations with simple, seamless access to applications and data.