President Trump signed an executive order to put an end to the federal government’s cybersecurity woes.

This order mandates a single set of rules for all departments and puts the head of the department as accountable for that agency’s security. The obvious idea behind this accountability is to avoid department heads from passing the blame to the IT department, every time there’s a breach. By doing this, agency heads were caught passing the buck without taking any steps whatsoever to correct them.

To put an end to this blame games, this order was drafted quite some time ago and was supposed to have been signed on January 31 of this year, but was postponed without any reason or explanation. But, finally it was signed and would come into force right away.

An unexpected surprise that came to light in this order was an initiative to move as much of the government’s cyber-defense programs to the cloud. This means, the government wants departments to move their data and applications to the cloud to leverage its many benefits.

This is a significant and sensible move considering that there are roughly 190 departments today. If each department tries to develop its own defenses, then it’ll simply be a duplication of efforts and a waste of resources. A better way would be to share services and resources, so that efforts are more streamlined and departments can follow similar standards.

The Trump administration believes that historically a lot of time and effort went into creating and protecting legacy IT systems in federal departments and this spending did not yield any result. To top it, there are a number of security vulnerabilities as is evident from the many hacking incidents that have taken place over the last few years.

This is critical considering that U.S system’s store a lot of sensitive information about its residents such as their Social Security Number and date of birth, which can cause a lot of problems, when it falls in the wrong markets. There are already many criminals prowling in cyberspace to get such sensitive information, so they can sell it in the black market for a substantial amount of money.

When government systems don’t follow security best practices and use legacy systems, they make it that much more easier for these criminals to get the information they want. So, this move to move to the cloud could enforce better security standards and hopefully, will keep the criminals at bay.

Besides these important strategies, the order signed by President Trump also gives directives on reviewing the general vulnerabilities of the U.S government and its systems, zero in on the main culprits and adversaries of U.S cybersecurity and provide training to the next generation of cybersecurity professionals, so they can handle the future cyber needs of the country.

In all, this is an excellent and much-awaited move that’s needed to beef up the cybersecurity of U.S and also to protect the assets of its citizens.

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