For the Department of the Interior’s (DoI) journey of moving to a completely cloud-centric organization, maintaining cyber posture and developing the workforce is key to the strategy.
Speaking during a Federal News Network Webinar, DoI CIO Bill Vajda and DoI CISO Jack Donnelly offered details on the department’s cloud migration journey and the role Trusted Internet Connection (TIC) 3.0 plays in the approach.
It’s been an evolving security plan and in TIC 3.0, in particular, there’s some interesting features there,” Donnelly said. “And what it basically says is: ‘look, you don’t have to follow all the requirements that Homeland Security (DHS) puts forward. What we like to do is have some very high-level requirements some use cases. And we’d like to see that implementation— not necessarily done by you— but you pick what you want to do on-premise, off-premise onto the cloud.’” Donnelly would add that DoI would like to play a role going forward in providing use cases for DHS to examine going forward.
Bill Vajda, during the webinar, emphasized the role in which the workforce has played and will play in turning DoI into a cloud-centric organization. He offered that moving from hybrid to cloud-centric was “a story about people” and that sustainably developing people with skills needed to be successful in cybersecurity was important to the mission.
“My concern isn’t that cloud works or that it works the way we want it to. My concern is our ability as a government, as a department to sustainably develop people with the expertise that they need to be successful,” Vajda said. “We’re actually in a sprint already trying to find those people and make sure that we’re capturing those skills and capturing that expertise as we go along.”
