Cybersecurity continues to be a major topic for all federal agencies. Although many agencies have been working on their defensive systems for avoiding the threat of potential criminal or terrorist attacks on their servers, there is still much work to be done. A recent study by the Obama Administration has found that most agencies have fallen short of guidelines put in place over recent years, even though these agencies have grown more eco-friendly. For instance, the cybersecurity Coss-agency priority goal was 95 percent for continuous monitoring, and agencies only managed to achieve 92 percent. Government cloud services could specifically use strong monitoring software in order to make sure that they are not hit by the various types of attacks that frequently can damage or take information from government-run offices.
Priorities for different agencies
One element of newly evolving standards for agencies involves prioritizing different levels of security for government systems. While some parts of the U.S. federal government house the oversight of millions of transactions, others merely house blueprints for new housing developments. While all data is valuable, not all is equally able to be used by terrorists or criminals in order to inflict harm or steal from the American public. As a result of this, the government is considering utilizing different security levels for agencies as a way of covering what needs to be covered without breaking the budget, according to InfoWorld contributor John Serrao.
As time goes on, more groups will need to make sure that they are prepared for the oncoming rush of security improvements that are so critical in the modern age. The use of cloud services that have highly-prepared, specialized servers equipped to deal with different types of attacks may be very useful to organizations that want to improve their security cheaply and easily. Instead of spending a lot of money improving their security and just being more well-defended, an organization can instead bolster their ability to transmit information and have their security upgraded as a fringe benefit. Getting two benefits at once is always better than getting just one, and utilizing a cloud vendor can make the difference between an agency that is well-protected and one that isn’t.
At the end of the day, making sure that a given group is able to use its resources properly is the most important part of designing its network, so keeping security and usability in mind is important.