The Executive Order – Improving the Nation’s Cyber Security

The Executive Order – Improving the Nation’s Cyber Security


On May 12, the President signed the executive order (EO) on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity. As with every executive order, it establishes timelines for compliance and specific requirements of executive branch agencies to provide specific plans to meet the stated objectives.


It is clear from the EO that the Executive Office of the President is putting significant emphasis on cyber threat intelligence and how it will help government agencies make better decisions about responding to cyber threats and incidents.  The EO also focuses on how federal agencies will govern resource access through Zero Trust and how to comprehensively define and protect hybrid service architectures.  These are critical aspects as government agencies are moving more and more mission-critical applications and services to the cloud.


The call to action in this executive order is long overdue, as modernizing the nation’s cybersecurity approach and creating coordinated intelligence and incident response capabilities should have occurred years ago. Requiring that agencies recognize the shift in the perimeter and start tearing down silos between cloud services and physical data center services is going serve to improve visibility and understanding of how departments and sub-agencies are being targeted by adversaries.


I am sure government leaders have started to review their current capability along with their strategic initiatives to ensure they map to the new EO requirements.  Where gaps are identified, agencies will need to update their plans and rethink their approach to align with the new framework and defined capabilities such as executive order improving nation cyber security