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Cybersecurity

Article | March 23, 2022

One of the challenges the government faced during the COVID-19 pandemic was keeping operations running. Certain advanced economies and developing nations' business continuity plans gave them an edge over their underdeveloped counterparts. But because of the pandemic, the national economy had suffered the pangs of unemployment to fuel the malicious intents of cyber-attackers, thus, protecting government assets that carried important economic information became a national priority. National security and staying competitive with other economies worldwide are becoming increasingly crucial in elevating a country’s economy. Keeping all public-sector companies and federal agencies running efficiently is a foundational block for the economy. Companies in public administration, like the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, as well as different ministries, public sector businesses, and more, need data protection from international cyber-threats. They use disruptive business strategies to make their operations more resilient. Now, that we know the importance of business continuity in the context of federal government and agencies, let us understand what risks does business continuity management mitigate. Business Continuity Management in Government Easily Mitigates: Individuals rely on the government during economic crises and disasters. A crisis or a disaster can be a huge risk to the economy, which can bubble up to an irreversible loss if not handled on a timely basis. Mitigating the risks of crises such as natural disasters, cyber security compromises, power and communication outages, terrorism, wars and military activities, global financial crises and more has become crucial. These crises can cause the loss of physical assets, human safety, and infrastructure that hamper government operations. This is why having a BCM plan in place is the need of the hour. The government must serve and meet the expectations of economic contributors. If there is a divergence or a timely action constraint, the government must maintain peace and harmony for the common good and economic well-being. Government Continuity to Support Individuals and Public Organizations: Resuming operations for public organizations and individuals quickly can be almost impossible without the intervention and support of the government. Government continuity is directly proportional to the level of trust, government reputation, and business resiliency. This is possible because the financial loss can be covered by insurance and financial help, as explained below. Insurance Policy Claims and Coverage: Making it easy to claim insurance during and after the crisis helps individuals and organizations reclaim their finances, thereby restoring essential functions first and full-fledged functions later. Providing reimbursement of expenses and coverage for losses for public organizations and financial assistance for the public sector remains one of the top priorities as far as resuming business operations is concerned post-disaster. Making sure that the insurance can cover the expenses and losses incurred due to the disaster is a part of the business impact analysis (BIA). Resiliency: Restoring public sector infrastructure in an operating condition, overcoming operational obstacles such as IT, power, and communication outages in a short span of time, and maintaining due vigilance to keep a check on national security builds business resiliency for the public sector. Reputation and Recovery Management: Reducing the turn-around time to fix and restore normal operations after a disaster provides operational resiliency through recovery management. This keeps a check on the best interests of the economic contributors and enhances their trust and the government’s reputation in the long run. Now that we understand the risks that a BCP can help mitigate and the role of government policies to support the economic contributors, let us understand how it improves the overall performance of a public organization. Business Continuity Management for Better Performing Public Organizations: The federal governments and public organizations have implemented an agile approach to bounce back from disasters, catastrophes, and crises using BCM. Because of this, the federal government is heavily invested into business continuity plans (BCPs) to improve how well their operations work and keep the economy and government stable. The factors impacting the performance of public organizations using a BCM are as below: Public organizations must know how BCM components influence performance in public sector organizations. They must be aware of BCM and the successful implementation of effective BCM. However, some governments that do not invest in a BCM have a much lower level of awareness due to a lack of human resources, finance, and management. They are allocating enough budget for disaster prevention, preparedness, management, and relief considering the government's initiatives. But not getting enough help from the government can make people unhappy, which can hurt the ruling party and lead to people protesting for their rights. Even though there is no direct financial benefit or gain from investing in a BCM, BCM testing helps to improve performance significantly. For governments to consider investing in the successful implementation of BCM and get funding for it, BCM professionals need to predict and evaluate the potential loss due to idle service time and its results. Each government entity must identify the likelihood of risks, define the best rescue objectives, and indicate the most cost-effective clarification and knowledge about BCM. Another challenge is using BCM in organizations that cut across several business groups or completing it with collective business-wide support. These situations show that old management responsibility and regulation are useful for making sure that all members of an organization prefer BCM actions. Recognizing the potential impacts of BCM on organizational performance is required in order to provide accurate value to the BCM powers, attract consideration, and, finally, obtain adequate assistance from senior management. In the journey to optimizing the performance of your public sector company using BCM, there are many hurdles that you need to overcome. Let us discuss them further. Challenges in Maintaining BCPs and Performance Growth in the Public Sector: Maintaining a business continuity plan as per the recommended guidelines is crucial to optimize its performance and efficacy. Your public sector organization's BCP will need to overcome some of the challenges to enable their performance growth as follows: Dedication of time from the top management of the public organizations, the ministry, and leaders towards deciding which functions are essential to maintain the BCP. Lack of complete understanding of all the business functions and their dependencies on other public sector organizations. Comparing the business functions on the level of criticality. Not implementing the BCM approach completely. Tweaking the BCM approach to show everything is taken care of Inaccurate assumptions are used to create a business continuity plan. Business Impact Analysis (BIA) - Determining how long a business process can be rendered inoperable without affecting performance. The Business Continuity Plan (BCP) takes care of aspects such as: Who will be affected by the business operations disruption? How and when will customers be notified? What issues are to be addressed in the first 48 hours? From the initial response to restoration, unique access roles and functions are assigned. Testing of BCP should be done regularly with the help of table-top exercises, walkthroughs, crisis communications, emergency enactments The importance of a BCP cannot be undermined as it minimizes the cost of business disruptions on the operations of public organizations. Let us discuss them in-depth. The Cost of Not Having a Crisis Plan like a BCP for All Sizes of Public Organizations: Although the costs involved during times of crisis may be difficult to calculate, there may be significant infrastructure and data recovery charges that can have a long-term impact on business revenue. Monetary loss, revenue loss due to idle time, reputation loss, productivity loss are some of the consequences that small, medium, and large enterprises have to go through. The major losses among them are as under: Loss of time and revenue for recovery and resuming operations. The company's brand image and reputation are at stake. Financial instability and loss Productivity loss Customer satisfaction is hampered. Some laws and regulations are violated during idle time. Distrust and loss of faith among investors Employee safety is at risk with the consequences of injury and death. Loss of infrastructure A business continuity plan has four strategies to boost business resilience. These include crisis and risk management; disaster recovery; incident response management; and business continuity planning. Acting quickly to mitigate the risks of loss as per incident response management during the event of distress is the first step. Crisis and risk management take care of the plan of action during the event of distress. The disaster recovery plan takes care of resuming the business operations to their normal condition after the disaster has subsided, whereas the business continuity plan takes care of all these aspects to minimize loss during distress as well as the time required to resume normal operations with the help of dedicated software. Conclusion: Performance optimization for public organizations is the number one priority for economic growth. A business continuity plan can directly boost performance as it encourages organizations to identify essential functions and maintain their operations during uncertain times. It helps save time, money, and safeguards people, processes, and technologies in the long run.

Emerging Technology, Government Business

Article | October 7, 2022

Governments and public authorities, like any other part of society, are vulnerable to technological disruption. Many of the issues confronting the government today stem from the fight to combat the global COVID-19 pandemic. Government institutions frequently discover that by employing tactics and strategies similar to those used by industry and the private sector, they, too, could learn to be more flexible and agile in their response. As a result, they have experienced a faster rate of digital transformation. Artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things (IoT), and digital twins are now firmly on the agenda of governments and public bodies, whereas they were previously only on the roadmap. Many governments, particularly in more developed countries, have realized that they simply cannot afford to be complacent when there is so much potential for positive change. So, with that in mind, here's a rundown of some of the most significant tech trends affecting governments in 2022. Digital Identity: Biometric measures, can be used in identity schemes to link an individual as a physical entity to their digital identity. AI and Automation of Public Services: In the United States, federal, state, and local governments are all ramping up experiments with natural language processing (NLP) technologies to reduce customer friction. Cyber Security: Close monitoring of cyber security is a high priority for states. In 2021, the US government announced that it would assist businesses in defending themselves against nation-state attacks. National Cryptocurrencies: The benefits of cryptocurrency as a monetary system are clearly compelling enough to pique the interest of governments and central banks, but there are questions that must be addressed, particularly those concerning environmental costs and energy consumption, which may have political ramifications. The Rise of Govtech Start-ups: The field is now open for a new breed of start-up known as "govtechs" to bring fresh thinking to the challenge of driving the digital revolution in government. For example, in the United States, federal, state, and local governments are popular with services that received a high volume of calls during the pandemic. The above discussed trends are the five biggest tech trends transforming government in 2022.

Government Business, Government Finance

Article | July 12, 2022

“Belonging to the essential nature of a thing; originating and included wholly within an organ or part.” That is the definition of “Intrinsic.” When we were developing the “IT Manhattan Project” framework, we were doing so in direct response to some of the most significant hacks in U.S. Federal history, which piled on to the already unprecedented push to expedite the modernizing of federal IT because of the COVID-19 response. The COVID-19 response shifted the way that the U.S. federal government operated, where our workforce worked from, the immediate need for mobile ‘available from anywhere’ workloads, and how to both secure and support that new way of doing federal business. A new, vigorous push towards rapidly modernizing federal IT environments was underway. Ultimately, it laid the groundwork for producing transformational federal memos and oversight by way of some of the following: Executive Order 14028: “Improving The Nation’s Cybersecurity” M-22-09: OMB’s Zero Trust Strategy M-22-09 NIST 800-53rev5: Fulfilling an expedited realization of the overall intent of NIST 800-53r5 through the emphasis on things like conditional access, TIC 3.0 frameworks, Secure Orchestration/Automation/Remediation, and modernized, agile approaches to secure micro-segmentation from Hybrid Environments up to Federal Cloud instances Overall mandates like these carry with them a consistent anthem driving at rapid IT modernization with rigorous proof of performance schedules attached. Piling on top of those Herculean efforts, the urgency was drastically increased by several of the highest profile cyber compromises in U.S. federal history. Rapid modernization had to happen right away. The time for IT transformation was here, backed by promises of significant funding and a high level of political visibility. The Shift to Zero Trust At their core intent, Zero Trust architectures are expected to provide a centralized policy structure that dictates how every individual flow in our IT environments are permitted to talk. No user, host, or flow is permitted without being subjected to rigorous authentication and authorization policy. This shifts our previous understanding of North-South, East-West traffic and how we police it. The foundational intent of Zero Trust architectures centers around applying unified policy to every transaction that occurs between enterprise resources, and doing so in ways that are agnostic to the IT Silo that they reside in. Zero Trust assumes there is no implicit trust granted to assets or user accounts based solely on their physical or network location.” NIST 800-207 aptly They go on to explain that the scope of this posture includes all assets, workflows, network accounts, and the like. In summary, police everything, abstract production traffic intent from the underlying infrastructure that supports it, and institute a unified security posture to execute the policing at every network entry point. Regardless of the domain. We all know that this is a tectonic but much-needed shift in our industry. I’d go so far as to say that the successful instantiation of this approach across Federal IT environments is critical to our national security going forward. Management Complexities Enterprise IT domains contain varied mixtures of OEM solutions, home-grown tools, and utilize a wide variety of protocols to intercommunicate that aren’t necessarily standardize. Each of these domains is normally managed by separate IT teams who specialize in maintaining those environments. In the federal landscape, each of these domains aren’t just managed by separate enterprise IT teams, but are commonly managed by different contractors. Therefore, IT security organizations have a difficult time achieving and maintaining the necessary operational awareness required to enforce centralized policy. These cultural complexities exacerbated by budgeting concerns have created a fatalistic mentality when it comes to far-reaching mandates. This is where the tectonic shift in architectural and administrative approach is so necessary. This is where multidomain architectures shine. Let’s define a common baseline of enterprise domains seen across traditional IT environments: Cloud Data Center Enterprise Networking Extended Enterprise (IoT, OT/ICS) Remote Access But to deliver a successful Zero Trust across the enterprise, it is first necessary to understand some foundational building blocks on which to construct our architectural approach: We can’t have MULTIDOMAIN POLICY without first achieving fuller We can’t deliver macro and micro-segmentation without first having robust MULTIDOMAIN We can’t have multi-vendor MULTIDOMAIN Zero Trust POLICY without sensical INTEGRATIONS to stitch each enterprise domain together. Let’s face it, enterprise IT environments don’t simply include infrastructure from a single manufacturer, or even a few key manufacturers. Rather, our Enterprise IT environments are represented by a plethora of IT manufacturers specializing in different niches of IT and the domains they are commonly found in. These environments are managed by different Federal IT organizations, different contractors who support these Federal IT organizations, and many different teams that support each common IT silo. Different teams that support oft-compartmentalized areas like Network Security Operations, Network Operations, Data Center Operations, Institutional Services, Wide Area Networking contracts, Operational Technologies, and dotted lines to different leadership oversight like CIO Programs, CTO Architecture, the Cyber Security Office, and the audit oversight bodies that they are subjected to. Each of these make up a complex support structure that isn’t necessarily streamlined for efficiency. Summary and Overarching Goals In articles to follow, you’ll see us referencing the IT Manhattan Project framework several times. Though many details of the framework can’t be discussed due to their sensitivity, the foundational principles are relevant across the board when pursuing intrinsic multidomain Zero Trust. Establish Visibility (Administration, Telemetry, Assurance) Define Straightforward Policy Structure and Hierarchy (Auth Chains) Perform Multidomain Integrations (API Integrations) Deploy Software-Defined Framework (Day-0, Programmable Fabrics, Multi-OEM Fabric Integrations) Establish Sensical Automation Runbooks (Day-2 Operations) We will also explore some areas that deliver unexpected value to the agency business in immediate ways. All of this will help create a cohesive story that helps CIOs, CISOs, and enterprise architects alike communicate the criticality of this multidomain Zero Trust approach to agency leaders across the federal spectrum.

Article | June 25, 2020

The biggest IT challenge local governments faced during the COVID-19 pandemic has been scaling existing infrastructure to accommodate many more workers than they had planned for, IT leaders said during a June 17 panel discussion. “Our remote access solution was originally scaled for a major snow day, not for 3,000 to 4,000 remote users,” Charles Gore, IT security manager for Loudoun County, Va., said during a webinar presented by CompTIA’s Public Technology Institute. “We were looking at 500 users remote. We had to spread the scoping across multiple technologies, which we had, but we needed to very quickly adjust to accommodate the new users.”