In March 2025, the White House released Executive Order 14144, “Strengthening and Promoting Innovation in the Nation’s Cybersecurity” (Federal Register Document No. 202501470), aimed at strengthening the cybersecurity foundation of the U.S. digital ecosystem. Among its most transformative mandates is a requirement for federal agencies to begin publishing cybersecurity policies in machine-readable formats – a concept often referred to as “rules as code.” While the term may sound niche or academic, the implications are profound: this is a clear signal that compliance, governance, and security must become embedded – by design – into the software development lifecycle; not bolted on after deployment or spread across disconnected tooling. 

This directive originates from the Executive Order’s Section 7 of the EO directs OMB, CISA, and NIST to pilot machine-readable policy formats within one year and adopt them across agencies and vendors by January 4, 2027. 

This EO is not incremental – it explicitly ties U.S. digital infrastructure to national security. As the order states: “Building on the foundational steps I directed in Executive Order 14028 of May 12, 2021 … I am ordering additional actions to improve our Nation’s cybersecurity, focusing on defending our digital infrastructure, securing the services and capabilities most vital to the digital domain, and building our capability to address key threats, including those from the People’s Republic of China.”

Moreover, Executive Order 14306, signed on June 6, 2025, amends EO 14144 – but crucially reaffirms the rules-as-code pilot as originally conceived. This continuity sends a strong signal: machine-verifiable security policy is now a bipartisan, institutionalized expectation for federal systems and their supply chains. 

For security-minded SaaS builders, these orders aren’t just regulatory shifts – they’re validation of an architectural direction already underway. 

From Guidance to Enforcement: The New Cybersecurity Baseline 

The Executive Order directs agencies like NIST, CISA, and OMB to move toward automated policy enforcement by making security rules computable, testable, and traceable within development pipelines. By 2027, the goal is full adoption of machine-readable cybersecurity requirements across government systems and vendors. 

That shift from paper policies to verifiable, machine-readable evidence is explicit in the EO itself, which directs OMB and CISA to require vendors to prove security practices in computable formats: “Within 30 days of the date of this order, the Director of OMB, in consultation with NIST and CISA, shall recommend to the Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council contract language requiring software providers to submit to CISA through CISA’s Repository for Software Attestation and Artifacts (RSAA).”

This shift does more than modernize federal compliance. It redefines how software systems are expected to behave – especially in regulated environments. Compliance will no longer be a checkbox completed during procurement or audits. Instead, it will be measured continuously, triggered by code commits, deployment events, or changes in system configuration. In this model, compliance checks operate alongside functional testing, blocking non-conforming deployments before they can reach production. 

SaaS vendors hoping to serve federal customers or adjacent industries will need to adapt – aligning their infrastructure with a model where policy enforcement is as integral to operations as uptime monitoring or deployment gating. 

Why “Rules as Code” Isn’t Just for Government 

While the EO focuses on the public sector, its ripple effects will be felt far beyond. Large enterprises and critical infrastructure operators – many of which take their security cues from federal frameworks – will begin expecting similar assurances. Rules-as-code means every environment, every deployment, across multi-tenant, dedicated and hybrid environments, every service must be capable of interpreting, applying, and proving compliance with relevant policy requirements in near real-time. 

In this model, evidence isn’t generated quarterly for an audit – it’s baked into the infrastructure. Logs are immutable. Access is scoped and timestamped. Configurations are policy-aware. In short, compliance is no longer just the responsibility of security teams – it becomes a shared responsibility between developers, operators, and the platforms they build on. 

For SaaS teams, this means secure-by-design infrastructure is no longer optional. It’s the only viable foundation for future market access. 

Four Core Themes from the Executive Order – and What They Require 

The Executive Order emphasizes more than just machine-readable policies. It frames a broader transformation of cybersecurity expectations. For SaaS companies looking to stay ahead of this curve, the EO highlights four architectural imperatives: 

1. Security-by-Design Is No Longer Aspirational 

The EO explicitly calls for secure-by-default systems – those that are designed to prevent common misconfigurations and security lapses through intentional architecture. This includes support for strong identity management, secure defaults, and controlled system boundaries. 

Practically speaking, this means infrastructure must support: 

• Multi-tenant isolation through namespacing, per-tenant services, or containerized boundaries 
• Automated provisioning that eliminates manual configuration errors 
• Default encryption and access controls across all environments 

Taking this a step further, many organizations will expect isolation enforced at the infrastructure level – not just in application logic – ensuring tenant boundaries remain unbreakable and suitable for critical workloads. 

Startups that previously viewed these patterns as “nice to have” for later maturity phases must now recognize them as minimum requirements for market credibility. 

2. Continuous Compliance Is the New Audit Model 

The EO outlines a vision of “compliance as a function of deployment” – where evidence of security is captured at runtime and updated dynamically. Immutable audit logs, policy-aware infrastructure, and runtime monitoring are no longer optional – they are the enforcement layer.  This demands infrastructure that can bind evidence directly to the events that create it – whether a configuration change, a code commit, or an API call 

To keep pace, infrastructure needs to: 

• Generate event-driven compliance records tied to infrastructure-as-code updates and CI/CD pipelines 
• Retain structured logs with appropriate access boundaries 
• Enable automated policy checks before code promotion or release 

This continuous approach removes the manual burden of traditional compliance but places a new expectation on infrastructure: auditability by design. 

3. Alignment with NIST and FedRAMP Will Accelerate 

The EO reinforces frameworks like NIST 800-53 and emphasizes modernizing the FedRAMP process through automation. For SaaS vendors, this signals increased reliance on machine-verifiable control sets and tighter alignment with reference architectures that can be continuously validated. 

To meet these expectations, platforms must: 

• Map technical controls to NIST frameworks via infrastructure-as-code templates or policy-as-code modules 
• Support compliance inheritance through environment templates or shared governance layers 
• Enable modular documentation that reflects live infrastructure conditions 

This level of transparency and traceability will soon become the norm in procurement – and a differentiator in commercial markets. Future-ready platforms will maintain a live mapping between controls and deployed assets, so evidence is always current and traceable.  

4. Speed Is a Security Requirement 

Buried within the policy-as-code language is a broader message: federal security workflows must move faster. Manual audits, PDF policies, and asynchronous reporting simply don’t match the speed of modern development. 

SaaS vendors that embrace automation – particularly in their deployment, configuration, and compliance tooling – will be best positioned to meet customer needs. Real-time responsiveness, zero-downtime enforcement, and deployment-aware security are no longer cutting-edge – they are table stakes.  This requires automation pipelines capable of enforcing policy in milliseconds, at the same pace as code promotion. 

The opportunity for builders is clear: platforms that can translate intent (a security policy) into action (an enforced control) automatically and scalably will shape the next decade of SaaS delivery. 

Building for the Policy-First Era 

This new landscape will challenge teams that treat security and compliance as afterthoughts. But for teams that have already invested in cloud-native patterns – such as immutable infrastructure, infrastructure-as-code, identity-first access models, and centralized observability – preferably aggregated in a unified console to reduce operational blind spots and simplify evidence collection – the EO represents a natural evolution. 

These systems already: 

• Track and audit changes as a function of deployment 
• Gate releases based on policy compliance 
• Generate logs and evidence as part of their core function 
• Abstract complexity through scoped permissions and service boundaries 

As rules-as-code gains traction, these architectural decisions will allow teams to adapt quickly – mapping incoming policies to existing infrastructure controls and workflows without needing a full rebuild. 

The EO makes one thing clear: policy isn’t becoming an overlay. It’s becoming the interface. And for vendors hoping to serve security-sensitive customers, the ability to code to the policy will define who thrives and who falls behind. 

What Comes Next: Platform Design for Policy Enforcement 

While the EO does not mandate a single standard or enforcement engine, the direction is unmistakable. Federal buyers will expect systems that can ingest policy, apply controls, and prove adherence in near real-time. 

As NIST summarized in its guidance on EO 14306: “Establish a consortium with industry to develop guidance that demonstrates the implementation of secure software development, security, and operations practices based on the Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF).”

For SaaS teams, this means building platforms that: 

• Support policy-as-code modules translated to enforceable controls required for specific frameworks (e.g., FedRAMP Moderate) 
• Gate deployments through pre-flight compliance checks 
• Maintain an evidence trail that connects policy changes to infrastructure events 
• Scale without rework when frameworks or requirements evolve 

By treating compliance not as a destination but as a design constraint, teams can position themselves as policy-ready – not just policy-aware. 

Final Thoughts: Why Infrastructure Maturity Now Determines Market Access 

The federal shift toward policy-as-code isn’t isolated – it reflects a broader transformation in how security, compliance, and trust are measured. Buyers are no longer satisfied with documentation. They are demanding more visibility – to understand how its designed to work, how the systems will interpret, enforce, and prove adherence to policy every time they run – without relying on human intervention. 

This doesn’t require reinventing the wheel. But it does require treating infrastructure as a first-class citizen in your security model. Teams that do so won’t just be compliant – they’ll be ready.   

NXT1 LaunchIT: Secure by Design, Ready to Deploy

Security and compliance are no longer checklist items for SaaS delivery – they need to be enforceable, automated, and built into your architecture from day one. That’s where NXT1 LaunchIT comes in.

LaunchIT provides a turnkey platform for delivering secure, scalable software – with policy-as-code, access controls, and auditability preconfigured out of the box. Skip the DevOps overhead and deploy with confidence, knowing your infrastructure is aligned with modern compliance expectations – on day one.

Get started with a free trial at nxt1.cloud/free-trial