Ruchi RoyMost government and public agencies are looking to scale their citizen services. With AI in the mix, these services are also open to new kinds of risks. That's where Zero-Trust identity, encryption, and network isolation become critical for multi-tenant gov clouds. We look at how these can be embedded across different use cases of citizen service offerings.
From digital ID systems to tax portals, modern citizen services are built on distributed infrastructure and multi-tenant environments. Post-COVID, the demand for these services ballooned.
Now, these platforms are accessed by millions of users, operated across jurisdictions, and tied to other similar platforms run by the government.
Canada for instance, has grown its cloud services funding allocation from $9.5M in 2018-19 to $29.3M in 2025-26.
And while this cloud-first approach creates tremendous opportunity for public sector programs, it also introduces novel risks around identity and access.
Zero-Trust architecture helps reduce that risk. But implementing it at the infrastructure level, where authentication, encryption, and segmentation must work together, is where most deployments fall short.
In short, the challenge lies in operationalizing the Zero-Trust framework.
We’ll be exploring how to build a foundation of Zero-Trust into your architecture, and how it plays out in real public-sector use cases.
Identity: Federated, Scoped, Continuous
At the core of any Zero-Trust design is identity.
You’re verifying not only users, but services, APIs, and control plane operations. Atmosphere leverages OpenStack Keystone for this, integrated with Keycloak in its Hosted and On-Premise editions. This setup allows external identity providers (e.g., government IdPs) to federate authentication via SAML or OpenID Connect, enabling single sign-on and central policy control.
Each token issued is project-scoped and time-limited (e.g., via Fernet), enforcing the principle of least privilege. RBAC policies are mapped directly to service permissions like separating read/write API access, metadata queries, and image provisioning down to fine-grained roles.
Hypothetical Use Case #1
Strengthening a National e-Services Platform (Tax, Benefits, and ID Verification)
Your public agency is looking to deploy a central cloud platform to support citizen-facing applications such as tax filings and benefit disbursements. You want to ensure that each department retains its own identity provider.
To do this on Atmosphere, federate through Keycloak to centralize role definitions and audit policies. A custom plugin enforces that API tokens for revenue systems expire every 30 minutes, and any elevation to admin roles triggers a compliance audit log, generated via Keystone middleware and streamed to SIEM pipelines. This architecture ensures identity is both unified and auditable across departments.
Data Integrity at Every Boundary
Encryption in a public-sector cloud must be consistent across data at rest, in transit, and in use. Atmosphere supports:
- Volume Encryption via Cinder + LUKS: Configurable during volume creation, with keys stored in Barbican (KMS). Available in Hosted and On-Premise editions.
- API Encryption (TLS termination): Handled via Octavia load balancers, ensuring ingress traffic to Keystone, Horizon, and Swift is protected with mTLS where supported.
- Object Storage Encryption: Swift buckets are encrypted at rest using pluggable backends, with rotation policies defined via Barbican.
What matters is that these systems are not standalone. Barbican integrates with the identity service and policy engine, allowing API clients to retrieve secrets conditionally, e.g., tied to token scopes, projects, or compliance labels.
Hypothetical Use Case #2
Ensuring Healthcare Records are Encrypted for a National eHealth System
You’re the national health service agency looking to deploy a patient record system.
If this project is run on Atmosphere, volume encryption is enforced via LUKS keys generated per patient record group, with access managed through Barbican’s ACLs. All records are accessed via HTTPS, and TLS certs for the internal API gateway are rotated automatically through an Octavia + Barbican integration. Doctors accessing records must authenticate via a SAML-based IdP, and secret access is logged and flagged for rotation every 90 days. This ensures patient data is protected against lateral compromise and meets local health privacy laws (e.g., HIPAA-equivalent standards).
Network Segmentation
Atmosphere integrates OpenStack Neutron with support for advanced segmentation patterns. Each project gets its own virtual network, firewall rules are enforced through security groups, and east-west traffic is isolated by default. In Hosted and On-Premise editions, OVN enables distributed routing and logical switches, avoiding centralized bottlenecks.
Where traditional setups rely on VLANs and static ACLs, Neutron abstracts segmentation into software-defined policies. That makes it easier to audit, version, and change without touching the hardware layer.
A typical government cloud separates its planes as follows:
This segmentation model prevents lateral movement and simplifies auditing. When combined with per-service certificates and scoped tokens, it produces a verifiable chain of trust across layers.
Hypothetical Use Case #3
Ensuring Regional Data Center Isolation in a Federal e-Governance Cloud
Say, you’re from a country with federal governance laws that mandates citizen data residing within regional boundaries.
Atmosphere’s Hosted edition provisions independent Neutron networks for each regional tenant. Each region’s workloads operate in isolated tenant spaces with dedicated routers, NAT policies, and floating IP pools. East-west communication across projects is disabled by default. Regulatory auditors are granted read-only visibility via Horizon and telemetry APIs, ensuring that each region’s traffic remains jurisdictionally compliant while sharing common infrastructure.
Policy isn’t Enough Without Feedback
No Zero-Trust system is complete without monitoring. Atmosphere deploys Prometheus and Grafana by default across control and data planes. This setup monitors:
- Keystone token issuance anomalies.
- Neutron port scan attempts or firewall violations.
- Barbican secret fetch failures or abnormal frequency.
- Ingress/egress anomalies via Octavia logs and API metrics.
For Hosted and On-Premise deployments, organizations can define their own alerting thresholds and feed events into SIEM tools or compliance dashboards.
Stratometrics adds cost telemetry, tagged to projects, services, and workloads, giving governments visibility into which departments or services are driving compute, network, or storage usage.
Hypothetical Use Case #4
Audit-Ready Infrastructure for a Government Digital Services Platform
Maybe you’re a public digital services provider hoping to run lots of microservices that are each owned by separate teams.
If you do it on Atmosphere, you get integrated Prometheus dashboards. The platform team detects token churn anomalies from a specific department, indicating possible automation abuse. An alert is triggered, the token is revoked, and Keystone’s audit logs are streamed to a SIEM backend. Meanwhile, Stratometrics report can show you important metrics like, a project with increased object storage usage in a month, helping finance teams allocate budgets per ministry. The feedback loop is technical but its impact is operational and fiscal.
A Platform that Makes Zero-Trust Operable
Zero-Trust becomes something implement across identity, networking, data, and visibility.
Beyond Citizen Portals
While public-facing portals are often the starting point, the same Zero-Trust model secures other national workloads:
Research Clouds
National labs replicate large datasets under strict data-sharing agreements, using per-project encryption and federated access.
Financial Oversight Systems
Treasury and audit departments exchange sensitive ledgers between regional clusters without exposing credentials.
Urban Infrastructure Networks
Smart-city analytics platforms segregate IoT ingestion, analytics, and administrative functions into separate tenants.
Each scenario demonstrates that Zero-Trust is reproducible across domains that depend on verifiable control and transparent auditing.
Atmosphere integrates and manages these pieces through upstream OpenStack projects like Keystone, Barbican, Octavia, and Neutron.
- Keystone + Keycloak: Identity federation and RBAC across departments.
- Cinder + Barbican: Volume encryption tied to scoped secrets and audit trails.
- Neutron + OVN: Isolated networks and programmable segmentation.
- Prometheus + Stratometrics: Real-time feedback and resource metering.
These are all pre-integrated in Atmosphere’s Hosted and On-Premise editions. In Cloud edition, some capabilities, like Barbican, Keycloak federation, and mTLS termination, may require additional configuration or aren’t available by default.
You can schedule a free consult with a VEXXHOST expert to discuss your requirements and arrive at the best config to suit your needs.
Whether you’re managing a national ID system, a secure research environment, or a regional services portal, Atmosphere offers a secure-by-default control plane aligned with modern Zero-Trust design. And because it’s built on open standards, it avoids the lock-in that derails many government digital transformations.
Additionally, VEXXHOST’s professional services team helps government customers scope, plan, and operate these controls during onboarding and beyond, offering 24/7 incident and escalation support.