b'[President Bidens cybersecurity executive order] marks an important step in recognizing thecriticality of cybersecurity, not only for nationaldefense, but the daily aspect of American life. - Bryant StewartOwen Rodgers: I would add that everyone is a target. It doesnt matter who you are, whether youre a supply chain player, private industry, an education institution or government agency, every sector is a target for varying motivations from state-sponsored actors to cybercriminals and hacktivists. For government, my main takeaway has been that measurable progress toward a Zero Trust type of environment is imperative. theres no time to wait or the headlines will continue to report more breaches and the unnecessary loss of critical data. The most important thing we can do right now is to implement Zero Trust.In lieu of massive increases across cybersecurity spending throughout the federal government, where do you identify the greatest opportunity to bol-ster current cybersecurity, methodologies, and competencies?Owen Rodgers: The biggest opportunity is in threat detection. There are ways to quickly and successfully accomplish anomaly detection or threat hunting in the network. This could be something as simple as turning on network security monitoring capabilities that are already in routers and switches and making sure that those capabilities are enabled. As Bryant mentioned earlier, we should also be advancing additional threat intelligence and information sharingbetween private industry and government. We need to accelerate this work betweengovernment and private industry to allow for collaborative information sharing to benefit the country and protect our intellectual property, infrastructure and national security.Bryant Stewart: Ive already mentioned the importance of adding agility into the currentprocesses for procurement. The establishment of funding pools and TMF is a great first step. And while the Federal government needs access to the funding to drive the transformation, I also believe that without rapid procurement vehicles to put that money to use, the fundingappropriations alone wont accomplish the mission. This past year weve seen incredibleexamples of innovation and results that public-private partnerships can drive.One of the chief tenets of President Bidens Executive Order on Improving theNations Cybersecurity is that of modernizing and implementing strongercybersecurity standards in the federal government. What does this mean to you and the private sector? Bryant Stewart: The Executive Order marks an important step in recognizing the criticality of cybersecurity, not only for national defense, but the daily aspect of American life. This is evident by the things weve seen in headlines, such as the [Colonial] pipeline attack that truly affected Government Business Council Securing the Nations Network | Page 11'