The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) SHALL be standardized on all systems used in the business environment, and it SHALL be required in the procurement process for new business devices.
The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) is a modern firmware component that is the replacement for the older Basic Input Output System (BIOS). Many users are familiar with the BIOS, the blue screen with white text that one enters by spamming a certain key during device startup. For convenience's sake, many users still refer to the UEFI as the BIOS, even though they are different pieces of firmware. At their core, both BIOS and UEFI allow a device's operating system to properly communicate with its hardware. When a user wants to make their system components to act a certain way, they enter the BIOS/UEFI to configure the appropriate settings. However, UEFI provides major advantages over BIOS, including faster booting and advanced security components like Secure Boot.
UEFI lives within chips on the physical hardware in a system. While the typical UEFI firmware is used to configure the system at large, individual components like graphics processing units (GPUs) contain their own dedicated UEFI interfaces that live within them and offer configurations specifically for that component. The UEFI interface contains a much more user-friendly interface than the BIOS, including well-formatted text and help options for the end user. UEFI replaces the Master Boot Record (MBR) in the BIOS with the GUID Partition Table (GPT). Both services are used to manage access to the partitions on the system's storage, but GPT allows for much larger partition sizes and numbers. GPT allows users to create up to 128 individual partitions with sizes greater than 2 terabytes.
A major cybersecurity control enabled by UEFI is Secure Boot. This service checks the system boot process and validates its integrity against a database of cryptographically signed binaries. If any of the system boot binaries have been tampered with, Secure Boot will stop the boot process and alert the user. Bootkits are a modern cyber threat that infects system firmware, allowing high-level control above the operating system layer. Secure Boot is a necessary service for mitigating such threats.
BIOS has largely been phased out, and UEFI is the new standard firmware interface. UEFI is also a prerequisite for installing modern operating systems such as Windows 11. If a business wants to keep its systems secure and modernized, UEFI is a necessity. Therefore, businesses shall phase out the use of any systems that utilize the older BIOS firmware and integrated requirements for UEFI in their technology procurement process.