Public sector network infrastructure should conform to the Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP), and the infrastructure’s encryption tools should be compliant with the most recent Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS), as required by FISMA. Public sector organizations involved in healthcare are also obligated to comply with HIPAA requirements.

It is possible to build compliance protections into the network infrastructure where sensitive data traverses daily. Future advances in network automation have the potential to reduce many of the pain points in ensuring regulatory compliance because the necessary protections can be programmed into the network control plane and scaled flexibly. In short, the network can play a critical role in compliance.