From: FCW
By Adam Mazmanian
Cybersecurity standards for critical infrastructure developed under President Obama’s recent executive order could affect the way federal government networks are protected against cyber attacks, according a senior official.
Under the February 19 executive order, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has a year to develop and publish a set of voluntary standards for operators of electrical grids, dams, water supplies, and other systems deemed critical for cybersecurity purposes. NIST director Patrick Gallagher said that federal networks could benefit from the new standards.
“If the private sector is going to go through all this trouble to develop a high performance cybersecurity baseline, I think the federal government should leverage that,” Gallagher said at a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce committee on May 21. One benefit to new standards is helping to achieve market scale for products and services that are compliant with the new standards.
While the executive order exempts commercial information technology products from falling under the scope of critical infrastructure, Gallagher suggested that standards developed under the NIST process could be find their way into IT products and services including cloud that are used by federal agencies. From the point of view of a federal chief information officer, new standards developed for civilian infrastructure could help an agency meet the responsibility of protecting an IT system that incorporates private cloud networks for data storage and application management, Gallagher said.
Rep. Doris Matsui underscored the importance of this approach to cloud security. “As the government continues to transition to cloud systems for data storage, I believe a strong public, private partnership is necessary for creating security standards for information stored in the cloud,” she told FCW.
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