At a meeting with President Biden on Wednesday, business leaders from a variety of industries pledged billions of dollars to beef up cybersecurity efforts.
Cyberattacks, such as those on government software contractor SolarWinds and oil pipeline Colonial Pipeline, have brought added urgency to such security concerns.
The commitments include creating new industry standards, providing stronger security tools to businesses, and training workers to fill the roughly 500,000 unfilled cybersecurity jobs in the U.S. Biden has recently signed an executive order requiring U.S. agencies to use two-factor authentication for logins, which can help prevent cyberattacks.
Apple plans to develop a program aimed at improving security across their technology supply chains, which will include working with suppliers to implement multifactor authentication and security training.
Through its Career Certificate program, Google will train 100,000 Americans in technical fields such as IT support and data analytics, investing more than $10 billion over five years. A portion of Google’s investment will go toward strengthening the software supply chain and encouraging open-source security, among other things.
CEO Satya Nadella tweeted after the meeting that Microsoft will invest $20 billion over five years to develop more sophisticated security tools.
Microsoft said it would invest $150 million in helping government agencies upgrade their security systems and expand their cybersecurity partnerships. Since 2015, Microsoft has spent $1 billion per year on cybersecurity.
As part of its effort to diversify its workforce, IBM said it would train more than 150,000 individuals in cybersecurity skills over the next three years. As well as the new storage solution, the company announced it was working on safe encryption for quantum computing.
According to IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, cybersecurity is “the issue of the decade” ahead of the meeting and outside the White House on Wednesday.” IBM will do its part to help skill workers in the field and he said he hopes the meeting will result in more coordination between public and private sectors.
Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division of Amazon, plans to offer account holders free multifactor authentication devices in order to improve data security. Additionally, it plans to offer “Security Awareness training” to organizations and individuals.
The financial services company TIAA has announced several initiatives to train more cybersecurity workers. TIAA associates have the opportunity to earn a master’s degree in cybersecurity through a partnership with New York University.
Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, called the meeting “a very productive, collaborative discussion” as he left the White House.
“Hopefully we’ll continue to follow up and do a good job to protect our country from a really complex problem,” he said.
According to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, the event “brought together the right set of people to have a good discussion.”
After the meeting, two water company executives told that the discussion focused on collaboration across sectors. Walter Lynch, American Water CEO, said there was an “understanding that we’ve got to work together to address the cyberthreats facing the country.”