Draft guidance from the National Institute of Standards and Technology issued last week, pushes government agencies to adopt a comprehensive, continuous approach to cybersecurity, tackling criticism that federal cybersecurity regulations have placed too much weight on periodic compliance audits.

The guidance, encapsulated in a draft revision to NIST Special Publication 800-37, will likely be finalized early next year. While federal agencies aren't required to follow all of its recommendations, NIST is officially charged with creating standards for compliance with the Federal Information Systems Management Act, (FISMA), which sets cybersecurity requirements in government, so this guidance should at the very least be influential.

As official statistics show attacks on the federal government continuing to rise, the Government Accountability Office and agency inspector generals have repeatedly found the federal government or particular agencies falling short of the spirit of FISMA, if not its letter. Meanwhile, critics have repeatedly found fault with either FISMA or its implementation in practice, saying that it doesn't do enough to ensure that government agencies remain consistently vigilant about cybersecurity.

The new document puts more onus on applying risk management throughout the lifecycle of IT systems. "This is part of a larger strategy to try to do more on the front end of security as opposed to just on the back end," says NIST's Ron Ross, who is in charge of FISMA guidance at the agency. "We don’t think of security as a separate undertaking, but as a consideration we make in our normal lifecycle processes."

Special Publication 800-37 fleshes out six steps federal agencies should take to tackle cybersecurity: categorization, selection of controls, implementation, assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring. It improves on earlier guidance by emphasizing making rigorous cybersecurity part and parcel of the deployment and operation of IT systems.

The document breals out its cybersecurity guidance in several steps. First, federal agencies are advised to determine the value of their information. Secondly, it recommends that they determine what controls are necessary for information of that value. Third, it suggests the need to actually put the security controls in place. Fourth, it advises an assessment of whether the controls were implemented correctly. Fifth, senior leadership is urged to make a decision as to whether adequate security steps have been taken.