2023 promises to be an eventful year for federal cybersecurity teams. Already, we’ve welcomed in a new Congress, which is bound to introduce new cybersecurity legislation, especially following the signing of the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill in December. The bill includes several cybersecurity provisions, of which $331 million will go toward the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation Program (CDM) — a key component to helping federal agencies comply with the National Institute of Standards and Technology Cybersecurity Framework.

But these historic investments in cybersecurity also bring more complexity to security and IT teams. Take NIST compliance, for example. Updates to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework are frequently announced to account for new and evolving cybersecurity risk, which means the introduction of new processes and procedures for security staff. And most often, these procedures need to be completed within tight timeframes, which can be tough to meet when talent is already in short supply.

The good news is that the right tools can significantly improve a team’s ability to meet compliance requirements while also helping to scale, increase efficiency, and reduce security bottlenecks. And the best tools can streamline processes, provide visibility, scale with infrastructure and operating requirements, automate low-level tasks, and offer metrics and reporting that add strategic decision-making.

But to ensure your agency has the right tools for meeting NIST guidance standards, the following are also necessary components of any federal security program:

1. Zero Trust
   Implementing a zero trust architecture is now a requirement for federal agencies. It is also one of the best strategies for protecting users, devices, data and systems. Choose products and platforms that incorporate zero trust principles and help your agency begin to achieve zero trust compliance.
2. Enhanced Visibility
   Implemented tools must contribute to discoverability and visibility within your networks. Improve security monitoring and management by selecting technologies that identify and catalog assets, find and validate security controls and configurations, detect traffic and usage patterns, and monitor for abnormalities.
3. Streamlined Processes
   Cybersecurity tools should build efficiency, not mire teams in more processes. The best tools help you regain time and resources by automating low-level tasks and workflows and reducing the number of manually intensive tasks. Asset management, for example, includes building an asset inventory and correlating associated asset data. Automating these low-level tasks saves time and resources, ensuring greater accuracy in the process. Automation can also reduce human error and encourage accurate decision-making when dealing with security crises.
4. Ease of Management
   Easy-to-manage tools go beyond a nice user interface/experience. Instead, the design of best-in-class tools focuses on usability, context and customization that aid decision-making. Look for simple or assisted setup processes and provisioning that facilitate usage to improve overall threat management and help meet NIST guidance and recommendations.
5. Scalability and Integrations
   There are two reasons scalability is crucial for cybersecurity teams: Tools must scale as the needs of your agency change, and they must also match the scale of environmental threats. Scalable technologies can flex to meet your needs without breaking your defense. Integrations can also help your security tools work with each other to reduce implementation times and minimize inaccuracies that can come with managing multiple tool sets. Tools that include a large variety of integrations can help agencies get a better view of their data and the context they need to respond to threats.
6. Metrics and Reporting
   Every security team should know what assets are currently connected to their network. If unknown assets are attached to the network, it will expose your agency’s network to unknown vulnerabilities. Teams utilizing NIST guidance need to be able to track, find and report on every asset in their security systems. Effective metrics and reporting options for tools can help organizations navigate compliance audits more smoothly.

How asset management can help

A hardened cybersecurity posture is only possible when there is full knowledge of all the assets in your IT ecosystem plus granular visibility into the assets’ security state. You aren’t able to truly understand what security gaps exist within your infrastructure, where your organization is doing well, or what needs improvement without first knowing what you have.

With a new national cyber strategy expected in 2023, federal agencies need to prepare themselves for new cybersecurity regulation alongside more complex and byzantine compliance requirements. That’s why it’s critical to nail the basics, like cybersecurity asset management, first. Once you understand exactly what you have, then the rest —  like the NIST Cybersecurity Framework — make sense. If you’re trying to satisfy these requirements, unless you get the foundation right, it’s never going to work.

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