As cyber threats grow in frequency and sophistication, continuous vulnerability monitoring and comprehensive asset visibility are essential to your organization's risk management program. Many agencies operate reactively with outdated tools and processes, unaware of solutions that can reduce risk and ensure compliance with IT transformation mandates for agile, multi-cloud environments. Federal agencies require efficient, optimized solutions to rapidly meet mandates like CISA BOD 23-01 and 22-01. To protect mission-critical data and align with FOCAL objectives, agencies must secure their expanding attack surfaces. Merlin Cyber and Qualys have joined forces to address the above challenges and bring automated cyber risk management solutions to federal agencies.
CISA’s FCEB Operational Cybersecurity Alignment (FOCAL) Plan was created out of consideration for FCEB agencies’ varying network and system architectures, as well as their differing approaches and maturity levels for securing these critical systems. The FOCAL plan intends to provide baseline guidance so that all agencies can standardize essential components of enterprise operational cybersecurity and effectively mitigate cyber risk. The FOCAL plan covers five priority areas:
Although the FOCAL plan outlines necessary steps for FCEB agencies to improve their cybersecurity maturity, the above objectives should be considered as the bare minimum requirement for effective cyber risk management to adequately address the modern cyber threat landscape. To reach a mature risk management program, agencies must migrate to a solution that enables repeatable, benchmarked cybersecurity processes and continuous monitoring.
Continuous and comprehensive asset visibility is a basic pre-condition for any organization to effectively manage cybersecurity risk. CISA’s BOD 23-01 outlines best practices needed for agencies to achieve visibility of assets and correlate a relation to vulnerabilities. A phrase commonly mentioned in today’s cybersecurity world is “You can’t protect what you can’t see,” and for good reason, with an overwhelming proportion of modern cyber-attacks and ransomware related to threat vectors afflicting undiscovered and unmanaged assets or shadow IT.
This reality emphasizes the fact that a comprehensive and continuous asset inventory is the cornerstone of an effective cyber risk management program. Without this holistic and ongoing visibility into heterogeneous, complex multi-cloud environments and the assets that reside across them, it is impossible to establish a solid foundation for effective vulnerability and threat management. Satisfying the requirements outlined in BOD 23-01 sets the stage for agencies to mature their cyber risk management program and work towards satisfying CISA’s BOD 22-01 mandate.
Once agencies have a current and comprehensive asset inventory, the next crucial step towards a mature cyber risk management program is to have an effective mechanism to classify and categorize their assets by organizational value. By tagging assets according to their criticality, agencies can then in turn prioritize protection of assets that pose the greatest operational risk if compromised. This not only helps security professionals better allocate their precious time and resources but also apply the appropriate security controls and prioritize patching for effective risk remediation.
Unfortunately, many agencies fail to remediate these KEVs within the required 14-day timeline due to manual and reactive processes, as well as a persistent disconnect between the cybersecurity teams responsible for identifying vulnerabilities and the IT teams responsible for applying the appropriate security patches to remediate them and eliminate the associated risk. The reality is that agencies are constantly playing catch up when it comes to patch management and risk remediation, which highlights the need for a solution to transform vulnerability management in the federal government from manual and reactive to automated and proactive.
Qualys’ Enterprise TruRisk platform is an optimized risk management solution for federal agencies to achieve comprehensive visibility of their assets, proactively manage KEVs, and prioritize and remediate risk across the entire hybrid and multi-cloud attack surface. With dedicated workflow and mappings to FOCAL objectives, and BOD 23-01 and BOD 22-01 mandates, Qualys TruRisk acts as the connective tissue between IT and Cyber teams to break down internal siloes and transform vulnerability management in government. Qualys’ TruRisk utilizes a lightweight agent that ensures total visibility and prioritized risk remediation without compromising system performance.
Through Qualys and Merlin’s partnership, federal customers can rest assured they are receiving the best in-class risk management solution and implementation best practices with Merlin’s public sector cybersecurity expertise. Merlin’s deep federal sector experience ensures that agencies can replace legacy solutions with confidence and enable rapid adoption and compliance with the dynamically shifting regulatory landscape. To learn more about how Merlin’s partnership with Qualys can transform vulnerability management for government, sign up to watch our on-demand webinar.