From: FierceGovernmentIT
By Molly Bernhart Walker
CAMBRIDGE, Md.–Continuous monitoring is employed at the Commerce Department in “pockets,” but that will soon change, as the department now has a departmentwide strategy, said Simon Szykman, chief information officer of DOC. Szykman spoke June 5 at the 2012 Management of Change conference.
Continuous monitoring “was not necessarily being done evenly in terms of scope…there’s no question that people were doing it, but it’s still a weakness for us,” he said.
Commerce component CIOs met last year to draft a strategic plan for departmentwide continuous monitoring. But when Congress did not appropriate the requested funds for the project in fiscal 2012, the program didn’t die. The Commerce chief financial officer and deputy secretary led an internal fundraising exercise, said Szykman. The bureaus pitched in to fund the effort and Commerce is now in the process of acquiring continuous monitoring technology in order to roll out the program next year, he said.
“It’s really going to change the way security is managed for many of the key controls, configuration management, asset management the kinds of things that everybody realizes are the basic building blocks of good security,” said Szykman.
The cybersecurity effort aligns with other work Szykman said he’s doing to unify DOC’s approach to information technology, which is often focused at the bureau level. For one, FedRAMP will enable greater efficiencies across the department, he said.
When Szykman was the CIO of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, he wanted to implement a cloud-based emergency-notification system. Another DOC bureau had already certified and accredited a vendor, “and at NIST we were looking at the same system and having to repeat the same work to use it at NIST.”
“For us [FedRAMP is] an enabler. It lets us trust what other people have done, examine what other people have done, verify and validate,” he said.
Commerce is also looking to unify the work being done at the bureau-level around mobility.
We’re “just now starting to move beyond the pilot stage and where we are at the department level is focusing on a departmentwide strategy for mobility. So, we’re at a stage where we recognize there are different models and approaches and we’re trying to understand those, evaluate those so we can decide what ultimately we’ll be pursuing.”
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