DHS Starts to Roll Out Enhanced Cybersecurity Dashboard
Starting this month, DHS will deploy the “minimum viable products” for the new agency dashboard, Judy Baltensperger, project manager for the dashboard of DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, tells Fifth Domain.
The dashboard includes capabilities such as cybersecurity risk-scoring and ongoing assessment metrics. The dashboard will be updated again in August.
The publication adds:
In November, DHS will deliver with the federal dashboard’s minimum viable products, like system health monitoring and threat intelligence feed integration, with a subsequent update for both federal and agency dashboards coming in February 2021. “We’re going to focus on delivering simple features,” Baltensperger tells Fifth Domain. “Then through our scaled, agile software development, we’re going to iteratively make enhancements to each of these products, and we’re also going to be collecting user feedback from each one of [the] agencies.”
Agency IT leaders and officials will be able to provide feedback on the dashboard to a new user-experience feedback team within the CDM project management office, according to Fifth Domain.
“The goal is going to be fit for use, operational data. We want you to trust the data that is in this dashboard, and we want to see you start to take action and make risk-based decisions on it,” Baltensperger says.
Cox notes that DHS has spent the past few years refining the quality of the data that sensors on agency networks and in IT environments send up to agency and ultimately federal dashboards.
DHS is also focused on bringing in more agencies that were not originally participating in the CDM program, Cox tells Federal News Network. DHS needed to make sure they had asset management capabilities, awareness of the devices connected to their networks and identity and access management capabilities, according to Cox.
For 34 smaller, non-CFO Act agencies, DHS has provided them with a common shared service platform to serve as their CDM dashboard, although each small agency can see its own data individually as well, which is summarized in the larger federal dashboard.
Cox notes that this process has not been easy, and DHS benefits when it has flexibility to meet each individual agency’s cybersecurity data needs.
“With larger agencies, when we implemented the DEFEND task orders that really expanded out the conversation we could have with each agency,” Cox tells Federal News Network. “
“We could take a look at the tool sets that they had in place and if those tool sets met our requirements, then we could utilize those to get the data that was needed to feed into the dashboard and on up to the federal dashboard,” he says.
