President Trump unveiled his long-anticipated executive order on bolstering the government's cybersecurity posture.

While the order contains several expected developments, like risk management and critical infrastructure policies, it also incorporates a number of initiatives to help facilitate agency adoption of its cyber goals.

Among them are:

Shared services as an IT vehicle

Though the Unified Shared Services Management office has been around since 2015, its role in the new executive order will be pronounced. The proposal calls for agencies to shift to a shared services procurement model for information technology, especially in the adoption of email, cloud and cybersecurity services.

The move allows agencies to develop a more centralized information technology architecture by unifying their procurement services through select providers rather than individual agency methods.

The shared services model initially showed promise in areas like human capital and payroll operations, but will be the modus operandi of the Trump administration's move to modernize federal IT.

The order also calls on the Director of the American Technology Council to develop a report with the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Office of Management and Budget director and the General Services administrator — in consultation with the Secretary of Commerce — to gameplan policy solutions for IT modernization, including how to transition agencies to a shared services model for IT and consolidated network architectures.

The cybersecurity order requires the report to be completed in 90 days.

Acting Federal CIO Margie Graves said in a May 9 American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC) meeting that OMB would be utilizing both recent agency reorganization executive order to help streamline shared services adoption.

"We are going to use the Reorg EO to bring some agencies together that are already partnering and looking at the possibility of shared services for areas where they share business space," she said. "So if you are looking at a unified business process, and it's inclusive of several agencies, why not come forward with some kind of reorganization element that is associated with that? It's the same thing with IT modernization."

The workforce is about to get a cyber boost

While demand for cyber talent has been a key issue in the government's workforce development plans, the executive order opens several avenues to bolster talent acquisition for cybersecurity.

The secretaries of Commerce, Homeland Security, Defense, Labor, Education and the Office of Personnel Management director will evaluate and augment education efforts to boost cyber the number of cyber professionals in both the public and private sector. The group will report potential cyber growth opportunities to the president in 120 days.

The cyber workforce will get hand from foreign allies

To bolster the workforce, the executive order also requires the Director of National Intelligence to examine the best practices that foreign allies are using to augment their cybersecurity personnel and how the U.S. might adopt them.

The DNI will also work with the secretaries of Defense, Commerce and Homeland Security to evaluate their national-security-related cyber capabilities in the next 150 days.

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