Last week, it was announced that Steven VanRoekel would be replacing Vivek Kundra as the CIO at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). It’s a high-profile position that essentially puts VanRoekel in charge of the federal government’s IT budget – currently about $80 billion a year. A tidy sum of money.
So, as VanRoekel assumes his new role, all eyes will be focused on how he handles the projects he’s inheriting from Kundra as well as new initiatives. Of the former, issues such as data center consolidation and the “cloud” are top-of-mind. Recently, much of the buzz, both in the government and in the private sector, has revolved around Web 2.0 and social media. However, they’re just two components of an overall security strategy.
VanRoekel must also take into consideration other types of application that factor into a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy. These days, hackers are pretty sophisticated and are quite adept at exploiting encrypted traffic to pass along viruses or other types of malware. For instance, unified communications (UC) platforms, such as Jabber, Microsoft OCS and Lync, and IBM Sametime, all enable federation, which is the ability to communicate with others who are not members of your UC community. The danger here is federating with outside networks that may present unknown risks, like viruses, hackers, enemies mining for confidential information, etc.
The same analogy holds for the “cloud” initiative. Cloud computing is all the rage, but there’s no shortage of companies and government agencies that are incredibly leery of turning over key computing processes and applications to the cloud. Security is almost always the first issue mentioned when talking to skeptics of the cloud. Multi-tenancy (i.e., sharing physical appliances that have been logically partitioned), data storage off-premises, and the relatively short history of this computing paradigm send shivers down the spines of the most experienced IT practitioners.
With the Internet being a global resource, the potential scope of security breaches is immense. Sophisticated hackers might reside in the US, China, Russia, Iraq, North Korea; you just never know. It is under this backdrop that VanRoekel will have to drawn upon his experience in the private and public sectors to devise a strategy addressing all of these security concerns. A daunting challenge for sure, but absolutely attainable, given today’s technology.
Wouldn’t you agree?
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