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President Biden’s Executive Order on Cybersecurity: How It Impacts Your Business
Cybersecurity: for a long time, it has seemed like wizardry. Your IT team might talk about firewalls, antivirus protection, and multifactor authentication, but those things seem like tools for the IT team, rather than things that may impact your business.
A recent move straight from the White House, however, has served as a wake-up call for businesses across the nation. In light of recent major cyberattacks, including the attack that shut down the Colonial Pipeline along the East Coast and attacks on other major businesses, including a meatpacking plant, President Biden has issued an executive order addressing and changing cybersecurity standards for the nation. In it, he establishes new guidelines for how the federal government should prepare for and manage cyber attacks–and how many businesses will respond, as well.
The Issues Covered in President Biden’s Executive Order on Cybersecurity
The executive order covers several key issues with cybersecurity, many of them aimed at providing critical protections for government organizations. The order:
- Establishes reporting guidelines and removes obstacles to sharing information about potential cyber threats with the federal government
- Establishes a Cybersecurity Safety Review Board, which will get together and review information about major cyberattacks across the nation and help ensure more robust protections
- Sets out standards that the federal government must meet across all its departments and agencies in order to maintain a higher overall degree of security
- Determines the need to create an incident response playbook for government agencies so they can respond quickly in the event of a cyberattack
- Created a pilot program that will assign security ratings to software in the supply chain, making it easier for government agencies and private business owners alike to choose safe, secure software for their needs
What Does the Executive Order on Cybersecurity Mean for Your Business?
President Biden’s executive order on cybersecurity primarily sets out cybersecurity standards that the federal government and its various agencies and institutions must meet. It helps provide a high degree of protection for the nation as a whole.
However, it also serves as a vital wakeup call for many business owners who have allowed their cybersecurity progress to lag. If you have, up to this point, been getting by on minimum cybersecurity standards to remain in compliance within your industry, it’s time to improve your overall cybersecurity measures and take steps to provide a higher level of protection for your business. For too long, minimum compliance standards have lagged behind the severity of the threats cybersecurity experts know their clients must face every day. The executive order serves to highlight many of the problems and challenges your business may face, particularly as cyberattacks continue to rise across the nation.
1. Your business will have to take responsibility for reporting any attacks, especially serious attacks.
The new communication standards mean that if your business suffers a serious cyberattack, you may need to report that threat to the appropriate government agency. Previously, many IT teams struggled with contractual obligations that might have prevented them from sharing that information or did not know how or to whom to report that threat. Now, cybersecurity threats can be reported and shared, making it easier to mitigate many of those threats.
2. It’s time to take a look at your cybersecurity incident response plan.
Do you have a protection and response plan that will help get your business back up and running quickly in the event of a cyberattack? Many business owners do not create an incident response plan until it’s already too late: often well after they’ve faced a serious attack that has caused havoc throughout their business. With cyberattacks on the rise, your business will almost definitely face some type of cyberattack at some point–and you need to be prepared to respond. Work with your IT team to establish a plan that will help protect your data, your business, and your customers and get you up and running again faster.
3. Make sure you have the tools in place to detect and log cybersecurity incidents.
Not only do you want to detect any potential threats quickly, which can help you remove them from your system before they have the chance to do additional damage, you want a log of the incident, how it impacted you, and your response. Those logs can serve as vital tools to help understand how the attack made its way into your system and help you close that hole so that you will not face the same threats in the future. With effective logs, you can also determine the extent of an attack and its impact on your system, which may help you more easily mitigate those effects.
4. Take a look at your supply chain and the software you use every day.
With the establishment of the new rating system for software–and stringent requirements for security visibility for government software–it will be easier than ever to choose software solutions that will help protect your organization, rather than offering hackers and malware an open door. Security is more than just a buzzword that software companies can throw out as they try to convince you to trust their product–but until now, there have not been consistent standards that would tell you exactly what protections a specific piece of software could offer. Now, you can evaluate the software you choose and its potential impact on your business based on these new standards–and choose the options that will help protect your business.
Are you ready to start addressing the security concerns that could threaten your business? By selecting the right software for your business, you can maintain a higher level of security and protect that vital information on all fronts. While you cannot eliminate every possible vector for a cyberattack, you can protect your business. At Menark Technologies, we help our clients find cybersecurity measures that can help increase the protections around the business as a whole, provide robust data backup solutions, and help create disaster response plans that can help your business recover from a cyberattack. Contact us today to learn more about how our services can help your business step up its cybersecurity measures.
