An article in the newest IT Talk, an official publication of the Office of the Chief Information Officer of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), highlighted NASA’s cybersecurity targets and a number of other vital parts of NASA’s Zero Trust journey which can be key to the profitable implementation of the cybersecurity and nil belief mandates, directives, and steering issued by the President, Office of Management and Budget, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
NASA Goals:
- Improve NASA’s cybersecurity and community safety; and
- Deliver an end-to-end, zero-trust/least-privilege structure throughout NASA with steady monitoring, evaluation, and real-time enforcement for native space networks, information facilities, and cloud environments.
Achievement of those targets is supported by reaching key outcomes, together with:
- Delivering steady monitoring, evaluation, and real-time Zero Trust microsegmentation enforcement inside authorities networks;
- Providing agency-wide community site visitors visibility and superior community move monitoring and evaluation to determine anomalous, threat-driven exercise
- Enabling essentially the most granular safety entry management enforcement doable to restrict malicious actor exercise and lateral motion.
To assist ship these outcomes, NASA is leveraging a number of Cisco options together with Secure Network Analytics (beforehand often known as Stealthwatch) and Identity Services Engine (ISE), in addition to Cisco’s community switching and routing infrastructure material powered by Cisco’s Software Defined Access policy-based automation and orchestration.
Visibility is Critical to Both Security and Operational Outcomes
Cisco’s built-in safety and networking options are highly effective instruments in enabling authorities Zero Trust safety by serving to to supply enterprise visibility and analytics that ship automation and orchestration throughout networks, information facilities, cloud, and edge ecosystems, in addition to delivering essentially the most granular, real-time, end-to-end microsegmentation accessible.
These similar built-in options are crucial to making sure optimum person and workforce community efficiency experiences since not all anomalous exercise is hostile in nature and will merely be artifacts that determine community points that must be addressed to proactively improve person experiences. In addition, Cisco networking safety options additionally assist guarantee operational community visibility and resiliency throughout each Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) Agency environments.
IT and OT Cybersecurity Alignment is Mission Essential
This final level, concerning IT and OT infrastructure resiliency, is particularly vital given CISA’s not too long ago launched Binding Operational Directive 23-01 (BOD 23-01), Improving Asset Visibility and Vulnerability Detection on Federal Networks. This directive highlights that “continuous and comprehensive asset visibility is a basic pre-condition for any organization to effectively manage cybersecurity risk” and establishes obligatory baseline necessities for Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) businesses to determine property and vulnerabilities on their networks and supply information to CISA at outlined intervals.
A key facet of BOD 23-01 is its scope: “all IP-addressable networked assets that can be reached over IPv4 and IPv6 protocols” and explicitly consists of each “information technology” and “operational technology” property. Frequently, insurance policies and steering are written for or tailor-made to the enterprise IT setting, and sometimes ignored are the OT networks that exist inside federal businesses (mission important OT methods, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) methods, and many others.), and that usually represent crucial infrastructure. In BOD 23-01, CISA has elevated OT asset visibility to the identical degree of significance as IT asset visibility.
This summer time, my Cisco colleague, Emory Miller, addressed the challenges to defending our nation’s crucial OT infrastructures in his weblog, A Closer Look: Securing Critical Infrastructure within the Federal Government. Given that the quantity of information generated and processed on the edge is anticipated to skyrocket over the subsequent a number of years, and that analysts are predicting related will increase in edge community breaches, CISA’s newest obligatory path couldn’t have arrived at a extra opportune time to boost danger administration and Zero Trust outcomes.
Cisco is proud to assist NASA on its enterprise Zero Trust journey and appears ahead to persevering with to assist authorities businesses ship unified safety and operational resiliency throughout each their IT and OT environments.
Share: