Secure. Compliant. Effective. Meeting the Needs of our Federal Customers. – Cisco Blogs

At Cisco, we are committed to partnering with the federal government to help them meet the mission. These days, that mission relies more than ever on a dynamic security architecture and partners you can trust to keep your workloads, workforce, and workplaces safe.

The past year and half have brought unprecedented change: President Biden’s executive order created new and needed requirements to federal agencies and their industry partners. There have been new requirements for critical infrastructure and new needs placed on the partners of the federal government at the state and local level. Remote work has become more prominent and more popular than ever, which makes the need to protect your network to the edge greater than ever. And all of this came as a global pandemic upended what we used to call “normal.”

While solutions like Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), Zero Trust, and cloud-based SaaS are not new, they have a reenergized purpose to solve these challenges. That’s why Cisco is committed to taking our market leading cloud-based solutions and making them available to the Federal and DOD networks.

Our commitment has propelled Cisco to achieve SOC2 across our entire Security portfolio and has brought us months closer to US FedRAMP, Germany’s C5, Australia’s IRAP and many other key global compliance frameworks. We are also committed to achieving DoD Impact Level5 (IL-5) for all key cybersecurity offerings. Watch this space as we expect to have announcements on these soon.

Our CEO and Board have always been close to the decision makers and great thinkers in government and across the public sector. We were present in the discussion rooms at the highest-level during attacks on critical infrastructure when America experienced the pipeline attack; when Health Boards in Ireland, Canada and New Zealand were taken down; when Solar Winds and Kaseya supply chain attacks threatened thousands, including many in the education sector.

As a result, when President Biden released the White House Cybersecurity Executive Order, we were one of the 15 vendors selected to share how American Businesses can navigate the Executive Order recommendations securely and with fiscal responsibility.

The work achieved with our federal partners is a direct result of our valued relationships. In many areas, we are breaking new ground to define what it means to operate securely. For example, our alignment to the Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide puts in place a standard operating procedure that outlines user requirements, such as mission owner responsibilities, Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) and DoD ports and protocols guidance. You can read more about this on the DoD Cloud Security webpage  and the document library.

The insight gained from  government leaders,  combined with our organizational modifications, have changed how we fund our compliance roadmap. We are now carving out budget specifically for these efforts and Cisco Executives have made commitments to the highest levels of government. The deliberate and focused effort around the various regulatory directives is driven by a unified team that uses a Cisco developed SMART roadmap process. It aligns development work across varying certifications, attestations, and regulatory frameworks to ensure focus, prioritization, and standardization to drive economies of scale.

This challenge of compliance in the real world of modern and aged systems; complex systems of shared responsibilities; and ground-breaking technology has led some security companies to try and avoid regulatory responsibilities by claiming their hardware, software or solution is not in purview. We refuse to take that approach.

Cisco is a leader in networking and security. Every day we take seriously our role to protect the protectors and defend the defenders. We know that we must play our part to match the robustness of the various regulatory frameworks required to operate in this demanding environment. I have taken this commitment head on, and in the past year we have overhauled our organizational structure, our development approach, and our product roadmaps to accelerate authorization. We will continue to work with our partners and with governments around the world to meet their regulatory requirements and  defend their systems around the world.

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