Zero Trust Coming to Government Budgets
We’re not yet in 2023, but the government, specifically the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), has filled in agencies on some of their 2024 tech priorities. The OMB’s memorandum, released last month, points to specific areas of cyber-investment priorities including IT modernization and implementing a zero trust policy. At the start of the year, the White House issued goals for reaching zero trust in 2024, but now agencies will need to earmark specific dollars for accomplishing these goals in their 2024 budgets.
No matter whether you work in the public or private sector, recent years have had an increase in cybersecurity measures like multifactor authentication and endpoint security. Personally, it’s been years for me since I haven’t needed my phone by my side at work to log into not just my Extract workstation, but to use our other business applications like Salesforce as well. Zero trust policies take these increased methods of security a step further, requiring continuous authentication to allow a user access.
This means that previously trusted locations, like for example being physically present in your office, will no longer be assumed to be safe will distrust a user by default. The framework gives increased visibility to those in charge of security, with the ability to see all connected users at any given time. Organizations using a zero-trust framework should also be augmenting the policy with things like traditional multifactor authentication or use the principle of Least Privilege to restrict unwarranted access to sensitive information.
The memo tells agencies that their budgets should include sufficient resources to be able to work with private sector entities to better understand and mitigate the large universe of cyber threats. Attaching a budget and the ability to audit for progress shows that the government is serious about this initiative and that they will scrutinize agencies’ progress in achieving their goals.
Working with personally identifiable information and protected health information, we pay very close attention to the cybersecurity landscape at Extract. We make software that automatically understands your documents and their contents, so PII can be permanently redacted in a snap, rather than needing to create manual redactions in Adobe. We also understand the importance of data ownership and allowing for the fewest paths to data vulnerability. That’s why our software resides behind client firewalls so it doesn’t introduce new vulnerabilities and keeps you in charge of your data.
If you’d like to learn more about the work we do with state and local governments, indexing and redacting their important documents, please reach out.
