Page 186 - Cyber Defense eMagazine March 2024

Prioritizing visibility: Visibility is the cornerstone of Zero Trust; you can’t secure or defend against what
you can’t see. Gaining visibility across environments and controls, particularly for federal agencies, is an
essential starting point for Zero Trust, and it plays a crucial role in enabling any Zero Trust strategy.

Adopting segmentation: Incorporating proactive technologies like Zero Trust Segmentation into the
security stack, which can play a pivotal role in ensuring that when cyberattacks occur, they’re quickly
contained to limit the “blast radius” of the breach. Essentially, ensuring critical assets remain safeguarded
and operations can continue even while an agency is under active attack.

Offering security trainings: Providing regular trainings on concepts like phishing to all staff members
enhances their understanding of modern cybercriminals' tactics, contributing to the prevention of cyber
breaches and fostering a more cyber-literate agency environment.

Implementing multifactor authentication: Another critical Zero Trust technology that can help agency’s
shrink their attack surface by practicing least privilege through continuous verification.

Own the Cybersecurity Narrative

It will take a collective effort for federal cybersecurity strategies to be successful. Gone are the days when
security was solely the IT team’s responsibility. Today, it requires cross-team collaboration and
accountability.

To this end, advocating for the integration of cybersecurity discussions into broader organizational
strategies and decision-making is essential to ensure that security is prioritized at all agency levels. And
establishing regular communication channels between IT and agency leaders will facilitate greater
transparency and accountability – ensuring alignment across security objectives, investments, and
broader agency goals.

With federal cybersecurity guidance, like The White House’s National Cybersecurity Strategy, continuing
to be rolled out, it’s clear that cyber is top of mind when it comes to strengthening national security. For
agencies, and federal CIOs, looking to make good on their cybersecurity roadmaps in the year ahead,
resilience and the ability to make good on Zero Trust progress will boil down to these key things:
collaboration, accountability, proactivity and progress.

Together, by prioritizing these four elements, agencies will be better equipped to mitigate risks and
strengthen their cyber defenses against everyday cyberattacks, ultimately enabling them to better protect
the integrity and reliability of critical assets, essential operations and sensitive data as threats persist and
evolve.

Cyber Defense eMagazine – March 2024 Edition 186
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