News Insights: DHS cyber re-org clears Congress — FCW

According to Pravin Kothari, CEO of CipherCloud:

“Congress has stepped up to reorganize the Department of Homeland Security for the establishment of a Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). CISA is significant in that it consolidates the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD) and incorporates capabilities and personnel that have been distributed into other areas. CISA also helps unify response and mitigation for attacks that include both physical and cyberspace elements.

It is important to understand that CISA will operate with intelligence information at the very highest levels of clearance, and will have many personnel detailed over from the Department of State, CIA, FBI, NSA, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (the old Defense Mapping Agency combined with NPIC and a bit more), DIA, and a few other miscellaneous “sector” and intelligence agencies. This is a major consolidation of cyber defense expertise from across multiple government domains.

Most interesting is that within 120 days of the enactment of the Act, the Secretary of Homeland Security will present a report on the leadership role of the department in cloud-based cybersecurity deployments for civilian Federal departments and agencies. The Federal Government has so far moved rapidly to take advantage of the cloud, and many agencies require support in designing and implementing a capable cloud security strategy. This cloud security report will be inclusive of the capabilities offered by the private sector, recommendations from the government best practice leaders, and much more. We expect that CISA will move assertively to incorporate cloud access security brokers (CASB), end-to-end encryption and many other capabilities for threat protection, data protection, and enhanced visibility into the overall government cloud infrastructure strategy.”