In a recently published article in Cyber Defense Magazine, Tyto Athene’s Chief Technology Officer, Peter O’Donoghue, and stackArmor CEO, Gaurav Pal, examine the urgent need to modernize how federal agencies approach cybersecurity compliance.
The article, titled “Modern Risk, Modern Response: Federal Cybersecurity Needs a Compliance Wake-Up Call,” highlights how legacy frameworks such as NIST’s Risk Management Framework (RMF) have become overly complex and slow-moving, creating barriers to adopting mission-critical technologies. Instead of discarding RMF, the authors call for a smarter, automated approach that aligns compliance with the speed and scale of today’s cyber and mission environments.
“By embracing automation, shifting compliance into code, and enabling real-time validation, federal agencies can transform risk management from a burden into a strategic advantage.” – Peter O’Donoghue, CTO, Tyto Athene
Key Takeaways:
- Compliance Complexity: Documentation-heavy and audit-driven RMF processes strain agency resources and timelines.
- Risk Visibility Gaps: Infrequent assessments leave decision-makers without real-time insights into security effectiveness.
- Velocity Mismatch: Traditional compliance cycles lag far behind modern DevOps and agile environments.
- Automation Advantage: Embedding policy-as-code, infrastructure-as-code, and real-time monitoring reduces ATO bottlenecks.
- Mission-Ready Security: Automated compliance ensures audit-readiness, faster deployments, and scalable enterprise-wide consistency.
Read the full article in Cyber Defense Magazine to learn how automation can help federal agencies modernize compliance and move at mission speed.