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May 21, 2021

The White House Executive Order on Cybersecurity: Top 5 Takeaways for SMBs

Raffaele Mautone
CEO & Founder

Last week, an Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity was issued. The administration began crafting the order as a result of a string of cyber attacks against our nation targeting both the private and public sector entities such as the Colonial Pipeline Attack.

At more than 8,000 words, we don’t expect you to have the time to read through the entire order. And while this Fact Sheet provides a more concise overview, it still may not be clear what it could mean for your business.

To help, we’ve put together a summary of the top 5 things you need to know:

  1. The federal government will move to a zero-trust model and will deploy cybersecurity best practices and tools such as secure cloud services, multi-factor authentication and encryption
  2. Barriers to information sharing between the private and public sector will be removed and IT service providers will be required to report any breach information that could impact the nation’s networks
  3. To ensure a secure supply chain for businesses and government, an “Energy Star”-like rating will be established to help businesses identify and source software developed with a priority placed on security and transparency
  4. A standard incident response playbook will be developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for the federal government and its agencies and will be provided to private sector businesses to use as a template
  5. The federal government will deploy a strong endpoint detection and response system across its entire network and will require cybersecurity event logging across all its departments and agencies

To be clear, unless you are a government contractor, this order has no legal authority over the way you operate your private sector businesses. We do however, highly recommend following this guidance to employ best practices and prioritize your investments in cybersecurity tools and resources to protect your brand, and everything you’ve built. And as we have seen in the past, standards like these will likely make their way to the private sector soon. As with most things in life, and in business, it’s better to plan ahead and be prepared, rather than risk a breach or losing out on bids because you fall short of enterprise or government standards.

Our all-in-one platform provides simple, effective and affordable protection for SMBs now and will help prepare you for whatever the future holds, including:

  • A cybersecurity team that includes Judy, a virtual assistant, AaDya’s customer success team and Judy’s Team Blue for threat remediation
  • Enterprise grade security including endpoint detection and response (EDR), automated threat detection and response (TDR)
  • Tools that make it easy for front line workers to understand and follow best security practices including single sign on, password management and anti-phishing alerts
  • One-click compliance mapping and real-time reporting and logging to make it easy to meet internal and external stakeholder and customer standards

We’re here to help you stay safe and protect your most sensitive customer and company information. If you have any questions related to the order and how it could potentially impact your business, or would like to better understand the level and scope of the security our platform provides, please feel free to reach out to our team at inquires@aadya.com or call 800.918.9113.