Intertia slows cyber progress

Agencies are "overcoming inertia" in their cybersecurity programs, said Rafael Diaz, chief information officer at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

"If you listen to this conversation about cybersecurity, it's all about movement. It's all about action," Diaz said, speaking as part of a panel at CyberCon 2015. "Really, I think the biggest problem is overcoming the inertia within your organization to implement the diagnostic and monitoring capability that involves the whole organization."

The event, held Nov. 18, is a co-production of Federal Times and C4ISR&Networks.

Diaz said that overcoming the stagnating inertia of implementing these comprehensive systems requires CIOs to really communicate the importance of cybersecurity to the agency.

"We are not articulating effectively to the base why you need cybersecurity," he said. "It's not just about putting controls in place and being secure for security's sake. It's about improving the processes and improving the business and improving the capabilities of that organization."

Among the concerns with developing strong cybersecurity is trying to protect the privacy of people whose data is in government systems.

"We tend to say we need to have something special," he said. "When handling information on citizens, you can call it privacy, you can call it sensitive information. If you were a corporation, you could say it was your customer's proprietary information.

"It turns out we use exactly the same protections for privacy, we just have a little, but more draconian policies associated with them."

"We have to put this in place with a lot of leadership, a lot of tenacity and a lot of collaboration," he said.

See more coverage from CyberCon 2015 here.

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