Expert calls for stronger zero-trust adoption to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure

Folalumi Alaran in Abuja

A U.S based cloud security engineer expert, Taiwo Justice Olorunlana has called for stronger zero-trust adoption to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure.

The DevSecOps expert urged relevant federal government agencies, energy companies, and tech leaders in the private sector to quickly adopt Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA) and AI-based cloud security automation, stating that old security methods can no longer keep the country’s critical infrastructure safe from fast-changing cyberattacks.

His new research, “Autonomous Cloud Security Orchestration for Critical Infrastructure Resilience: A Zero Trust-Based Federated Model,” was published in the May 2024 edition of the International Journal of Science, Architecture, Technology, and Environment and is attracting interest from people in cybersecurity and national resilience fields.

Olorunlana argues that increased cloud adoption, distributed systems, and high-profile attacks—such as the Colonial Pipeline and SolarWinds breaches—expose the limits of traditional perimeter defenses.
“Critical infrastructure now runs on cloud-connected, highly distributed systems,” he said, adding that “Cyber adversaries move in seconds. Our defenses must be autonomous, adaptive, and grounded in Zero Trust—assuming breach and responding instantly.”

The study proposes a federated Zero Trust framework that integrates AI/ML analytics, policy-as-code, and automated orchestration across multi-cloud and multi-agency environments.

It draws on real-world initiatives by the U.S. Department of Energy, Microsoft Azure Government Cloud, Siemens Energy, AWS, and Idaho National Laboratory.

Olorunlana emphasises that inconsistent policies, lack of interoperability across cloud platforms, and outdated security architectures leave dangerous gaps across critical systems.

The expert calls for National Zero Trust Orchestration Framework to unify standards, enhance real-time threat intelligence sharing, and mandate Zero Trust maturity milestones across industries responsible for national safety and economic continuity.

“The future of national resilience depends on intelligent, automated, and interoperable defenses. Technology will not replace cybersecurity professionals—but those who fail to adapt will be replaced by those who do,” he said.

Olorunlana is a U.S.-based cloud security engineer and DevSecOps professional with expertise in zero trust architecture, cloud-native security, and AI-driven threat detection. He holds an M.S. in Management Information Systems from Lamar University and has published multiple peer-reviewed studies on critical infrastructure protection and intelligent security orchestration. In addition to his research contributions, he has served as a reviewer for scholarly manuscripts in cybersecurity and information systems, offering an expert evaluation of academic work in his field. He recently expanded his authorship portfolio with the release of his new book, The Ghana-China Blueprint: Understanding Two Nations’ Journeys Toward Economic Excellence.

Olorunlana has led real-time projects deploying Terraform-managed infrastructures, secure CI/CD pipelines, and automated cloud security workflows across enterprise and government environments.