By Dave Young, SVP of Lumen Public Sector and Hyperscaler business

By delivering the fastest, most secure platform for applications and data to help businesses, government and communities deliver amazing experiences, Lumen plays a critical role in the communications and technology ecosystem that can help protect the cybersecurity of all things.

As public sector agencies develop plans for achieving the objectives of President Biden’s Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity, we know the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We see this as an opportunity for innovation writ large and a unified approach to creating secure digital experiences for our citizens and government employees alike.

We’re on this journey too as a global tech company dedicated to helping government agencies achieve their missions. We welcome an opportunity to share some of the precautions and lessons learned that can help shape an organization’s cyber response.

By investing in cybersecurity from the start, Lumen has built a platform that provides network resilience, data protection, and unique cyberthreat intelligence and mitigation services. We  continue to invest in products and services that can help our public sector customers meet the cyber challenges of today while preparing for the uncertainty of tomorrow.

For example, we recently built out our new Federal Security Operations Centers (SOCs), incorporating FISMA high protections into our suite of products and delivering latency-sensitive, data-intensive applications with the security, performance and speed needed at the edge of the network. 

Having one of the most deeply peered and well-connected IP networks in the world gives Lumen expansive, near-real-time visibility into cyberthreats, which can reduce an organization’s overhead costs for threat identification and eradication. Our global backbone provides more opportunities to see advanced cyberthreats, which means we can offer quick response times and rapid advanced analysis of reportable cyber events.

All the while, Lumen continues to meet the challenge of a profoundly expanded network environment by helping government agencies on their journey to Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) 3.0 realize the benefits of zero trust networking.

Our Managed Trusted Internet Protocol Services (MTIPS) product was one of the first to complete the TIC capability validation and is designed for scalability and growth. This solution allows agencies to connect physically and logically to the public internet while meeting strict TIC compliance requirements.

The attack surface continues to grow as organizations expand their cyber protections to meet emerging needs. However, this renewed focus on the network must be paired with a layered defense to help mitigate against ransomware, malware and other advanced persistent threats.

Using Adaptive Threat Intelligence and behavioral analytics, Lumen’s 24/7 Security Operations Centers enable automated real-time threat detection and remediation of impacted endpoints to pre-infection states as a service. 

With a continued focus on updating the federal government’s approach to securing their IT systems, we provide direct, dynamic connections to more 2,200 public and private data centers so agencies can securely and seamlessly connect to the cloud.

Lumen and our cyberthreat intelligence group known as Black Lotus Labs are committed to leveraging our network visibility to help government agencies securely carry out their missions and keep the broader internet clean, two important items that are the subject of the recent White House Executive Order.

Let’s have a discussion about the future of cybersecurity and what can be done to improve your organization’s cyber posture now. You can learn more about our cybersecurity solutions designed for the public sector by visiting us at https://www.lumen.com/public-sector/solutions/security.html.