Federal agencies are re-emphasizing the need to develop and deploy government cybersecurity solutions using the Risk Management Framework published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Agency technology leaders bear responsibility for ensuring that their cybersecurity programs operate in compliance with the RMF. For organizations with little experience, this effort can be overwhelming , but taking a methodical approach to RMF implementation will yield significant benefits. Let’s take a look at three steps agency leaders can take to begin a robust cybersecurity program.

The decennial U.S. census is about to begin. The work of the census provides crucial information for government agencies, academic researchers and private businesses, but it also opens the door for cybercriminals seeking to exploit the widespread publicity around the census to conduct malicious attacks. We will inevitably witness social engineering attacks from individuals pretending to be associated with the census asking for Social Security numbers, passwords and other sensitive personally identifiable information.

Organizations need to prepare themselves for these inevitable attacks and ensure that their employees don’t fall for scams that accidentally compromise sensitive information.

As a CDW field solution architect, I work with organizations across numerous industries as they grapple with the complexity of securing cloud computing environments. These environments range from full-scale public cloud deployments to internal private clouds, along with varying degrees of hybrid cloud. But whatever the technology, the security issues remain constant. We work with them to protect their data, applications and infrastructure against a wide range of threats.

Here are some key steps that you can take to secure your own cloud computing deployments.

Most organizations spend massive amounts of time, energy and financial resources trying to make their corporate networks as secure and reliable as possible.

That’s important, of course — necessary, even. But it’s no longer sufficient.

As a CDW security enterprise architect, I spend my time traveling the country helping our customers meet the security challenges they face on a daily basis. This allows me to work with organizations across various industries and to work in almost every area of cybersecurity — from identity and access management and security operations to governance and risk management.

Many organizations have embraced software-defined innovations such as the software-defined data center and the software-defined WAN, taking advantage of programmability and automation to simplify the management of their networks and other data center resources. What’s been missing, until recently, was a way to achieve the same benefits at the access layer of the network.