Agencies can ensure that their servers are secure from the start by working with a proactive industry partner to implement a comprehensive strategy.

The risk of adversaries compromising the IT infrastructure supply chain is ever present, putting agency data and potentially even lives at risk, as evidenced by the Hezbollah pager blasts in September.

Agencies must comply with a series of mandates — including last year’s Securing the Information and Communications Technology and Services Supply Chain executive order — directing them to acquire IT through a secure supply chain. Technology leaders must go beyond mere compliance, but that’s only part of the equation.

With servers, in particular, “government needs to know from the very beginning of a product’s lifecycle that nobody is going to defeat its security strategy by, for example, injecting compromised firmware,” says Cole Humphreys, global server security product management expert at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

LEARN MORE: Do you know the two types of hypervisors available to agencies?