Put a halo around every proposal with cyber resilience.
At first blush, “cybersecurity” and “cyber resilience” seem interchangeable. But actually, there are two different approaches to protecting your data. And, if you want to work with the government, your organization needs a plan for both.
While a cybersecurity strategy can help prevent a data breach or reduce the risk of malicious activity, a cyber resilience strategy helps specifically mitigate the impacts of these attacks. Cyber resilience is aimed at continuously delivering the intended outcome, despite the attack. It mitigates the risks and severity of attacks and includes practices such as Zero Trust, and continuous monitoring and mitigation (CDM) for good management configuration.
However, the NIST Risk Management Framework (RMF) provides a process for both security and cyber supply chain risk management best practices into the system development life cycle. And at the foundation of that is NIST SP 800-53. The RMF is a guide to creating cybersecurity and cyber resilience within your organization. And as complex and confusing as it all sounds, automation makes it easy and makes you stand out to prospective customers.
Shine before you even get the contract.
Whether you are a traditional government contractor or an OT (other transaction) you must harden your system and demonstrate security best practices. Implementing an effective Plan of Action and Milestones (POAM) strategy shows you have a corrective action plan for tracking and planning the resolution of information security, privacy, and weakness. When responding to an RFP, you are, in essence, placing a glowing white halo around your business.
The problem is that RMF accreditation relies on working through STIG, CIS, and CMMC controls and checklists (all of which are based on NIST SP 800-53). And that can take weeks of tedious work to establish. You’ll need a team of specialists that are in exceedingly high demand, and you will need to pay them richly.
There is an easy and much faster way to increase your system hardening velocity, reduce costs and save you a whole lot of headaches.
Accelerate your RMF accreditation and add the extra oomph of Zero Trust.
Zero Trust is a highly effective layer of security. Instead of trusting your users and then validating them, Zero Trust requires you to trust no one. With Zero Trust, users must continually validate themselves within your system as they access more complex levels of data.
Zooming out of this authentication practice, Zero Trust “adds four additional concepts” critical to cybersecurity and cyber resilience, according to SteelCloud COO Brian Hajost. These are:
- Continual identity validation
- Continual configuration validation (CDM)
- Knowing and segmenting your applications and data
- Continual filtering access based on the validation of identity and configuration
Dashboards are a vital step in the CDM process. The most important part of the process is fixing. Instead of assessing and correcting, the focus should be remedying and evaluating. Getting to the root cause of the issues and fixing them is essential, so they don’t happen again. The dashboard is a critical component but needs to be balanced with a mitigation and automation effort.
Reduce 95% of your eMASS effort and look like a hero.
The enterprise Mission Assurance Support Service (eMASS) provides a repository that unites technical/machine data generated from endpoint scans with the human/non-technical data documented by security and IA personnel.
SteelCloud’s ConfigOS can remove 95% of the effort by automating and reducing the effort and errors in merging non-technical CKL data with machine-generated technical data. In addition, automation simplifies the production and input of compliance data into eMASS. This simple integrated solution is a game-changer and ensures the easy synchronization of massive numbers of checklist files, eMASS data, and SIEM dashboards. Everything is in sync, and everything is up to date.
Automation only makes your customers’ hearts grow fonder.
Whether or not your commercial organization is within the FCEB supply chain, you should be aware of the changes coming. Likely, the federal supply chain’s reach will lead to long-term changes in how companies must monitor and document security. Fundamentally, meeting the new requirements driven by the Executive Order will mean setting security baselines and maintaining secure configurations.
Make SteelCloud’s ConfigOS your secret weapon for securing government contracts., Get your team up and running with our easy-to-use solution in four hours, even without deep technical knowledge. Given the short timelines contained in the Executive Order, FCEB agencies won’t start from scratch, and this means neither should you.
