How Can Federal Agencies Modernize to Protect Against Cybersecurity Threats

Every organization must ensure they keep their data safe; private organizations must fend off ransomware, credential theft, data breaches and more. Federal agencies must contend with fending off the same threats, but they must also deal with threats from abroad that impact national security and many other unique challenges.

Federal agencies contend with limited budgets, outdated technologies and the need to comply with government mandates. These challenges have been amplified in recent years with an increased demand on resources due to changes in remote and hybrid work.

The onset of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 required organizations across the public and private sectors to embrace remote-work innovations. This increase in working from home has created a greater demand for federal agencies to modernize their applications, networks and devices to accommodate workers, while also ensuring the security of their data.

Extensive modernization like this can be overwhelming, and yet it is absolutely essential. In 2021 the Ponemon Institute reported that in the previous few years, 54 percentof federal IT and cybersecurity practitioners had a cybersecurity incident that significantly disrupted their agency’s mission.

 Earlier this year the MOVEit breach affected hundreds of businesses and organizations. The Federal News Network reported that the US Department of Energy was among “several” federal agencies hit by the breach. The opportunistic attack led to the exposure of sensitive data including personnel and other private company information.

Agencies can reduce the likelihood and impact of these incidents by maturing their zero-trust architecture in the following areas.

• Identity and Access Management: Tools such as multifactor authentication can help ensure that only authorized users are able to access sensitive systems.
• Data Protection: Solutions that can track, provide end to end encryption, and classify the movement of data can help prevent data breaches and streamline investigations.
• Device Based Solutions: Devices have to comply with organizational security standards before they can connect to an agencies systems or networks.
• Network Security: Protecting the network is fundamental to cybersecurity. Network segmentation helps limit the attack blast radius.
• Application Security: Agencies are modernizing legacy applications through cloud migrations and transformations while managing a rapidly expanding software supply chain. They must ensure that development processes are secure, that  third party platforms are compliant and have adequate visibility to monitor the cumulative attack surface.
• Visibility and Analytics: Visibility and analytics solutions help agencies gather the information they need to make informed security decisions, detect threats, respond to incidents and measure progress.
• Orchestration and Automation: Agencies are seeking security orchestration and automation solutions to reduce the time to respond and to allow their resources to focus on higher value tasks.
• Cyber Resilience: These tools ensure that your last line of defense (recovery) is successful by providing immutable or air-gapped backups that can be quickly restored.  

CDW·G understands that federal agencies face unique challenges when modernizing their legacy technologies. Our dedicated experts will work with you to build the right solution for your mission.

Story by Sebastian Szykier, who is the Federal Security Practice Manager at CDW·G with over 20 years of experience helping make public sector security easier.  Specializing in security engineering, operations and leadership, Sebastian uses that experience to mature security architectures and programs for the agencies our nation depends on the most.