Thinking About Cyber Compliance in Terms of Mission Success. (INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE)

• Date: 01 February 2025
• Author: Wingo, Joe
• Published date: 01 February 2025

Cybersecurity in the federal government, and particularly in the Defense Department, is extremely complex and subject to a litany of regulations, guidelines and directives from the White House, Congress, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the department itself.

Consequently, cybersecurity leaders in the office of the secretary of defense and the military services are under increasing pressure to comply with policy directives for adopting zero trust architectures, NIST's cyber-security guidelines and a seemingly constant stream of executive orders.

These regulations and directives seek to achieve crucially important objectives and have been baked into the department's strategy.

For example, in May 2024 the Defense Information Systems Agency published its latest five-year plan for 2025-2029, which included zero trust integration--a cybersecurity model that mandates strict identity authentication for every request to access an organization's devices or data--as one of three top priorities.

In the strategy document, the Pentagon's Chief Information Officer John Sherman said: "We are determined to get zero trust...