What Businesses Could Learn From Joe Biden’s $10b Cybersecurity Drive
After the highly-publicized discovery of a huge hack of US government agencies, the then-President-elect of the United States, Joe Biden, declared in December that his incoming administration would “elevate cybersecurity as an imperative across the government,” as quoted by Forbes.
Biden added that his administration would “further strengthen partnerships with the private sector and expand our investment in the infrastructure,” outlining ambitious plans which Biden openly fleshed out weeks later. In all, Biden has earmarked over $10 billion for a range of cybersecurity initiatives.
Perhaps to your own surprise, you could soon realize how many of the now-46th President’s plans have the potential to inspire your company’s own efforts at protecting itself in the cybersecurity space.
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The background behind President Biden’s cybersecurity mission
Following the above-mentioned hack, which came about as a result of a security hole in software from the IT firm SolarWinds, Biden unveiled the $10b cybersecurity funding as part of his $1.9 trillion COVID-19 recovery proposal. The proposal declared the nation’s cybersecurity a “crisis”, as The Hill has reported.
Of the $10b funding, roughly $9b has been set aside for the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency and a broad upgrade of the federal government’s security.
Meanwhile, $300m has been proposed for building new secure tech schemes at the General Services Administration, $200m for recruiting new cybersecurity tech and engineering expertise, and $690m for improving the government’s security monitoring and incident response.
“This was part of his campaign platform. It’s not just something that’s purely reactionary or politically motivated,” Lee Feldman, a strategy development manager for Microsoft’s corporate venture arm M12, has said of Biden’s cybersecurity focus.
How zero trust security could come under greater focus
Feldman expects many of Biden’s cybersecurity moves to take a “zero trust” approach to protect government networks. “This is the concept of eliminating any trust from the network, and really scrutinizing any access into that network,” Feldman explains to SDxCentral. “Essentially, it’s figuring out what is the perimeter and protecting all angles of it.”
Feldman particularly anticipates the Biden administration investing across “the four pillars of zero trust”: identity management, conditional access, endpoint security and application management. “We need to move to the front lines, and start being hunters, finding these vulnerabilities before they happen,” Feldman says.
What lessons could your business take away from all of this?
Your company can already easily take up a zero-trust security solution for its own use – a solution such as Wandera Private Access, which provides zero-trust network access through the cloud. With a zero trust tool like this at close hand, your workforce can readily access crucial resources from any device running any operating system while continuing to keep work activities firmly secure.
The Congress-established Cyberspace Solarium Commission has advocated what Feldman calls “a well-rounded set of priorities across people, processes and technology that will really help drive the change needed” in US cybersecurity policies. You could benefit immensely from determining – and, of course, acting on – a similar set of priorities for bolstering your company’s cybersecurity efforts.
