The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is well on its way to implementing new cloud and IT environments that the agency has been working on for the past two years, a top agency tech official said this week.
Robert Costello, CISA’s chief information officer, discussed those projects and the agency’s zero trust security journey during the Zscaler Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C., on April 4.
“We’re starting to deploy technology solutions as we’ve spent the last two years really building new environments versus migrating into [them], and it takes a while to do it right,” said Costello.
Crucially, the CIO underscored the pivotal role of user input in the creation of these new cloud and zero-trust environments, highlighting the agency’s firm belief in the power of collaboration and collective effort.
Migrating into new IT environments, he said, has to involve the whole community of your user base.”
“I have very demanding users, very tech-savvy users,” Costello said.
“The other element of this is the cybersecurity director and he’s a great partner through this [and] is helping make my organization better as we take over work for them. They don’t want to deploy their own infrastructure. They don’t want to manage their own other solutions. They want to concentrate on their mission side,” Costello said.
He also keyed on the need to lowering the barriers to entry for newer tech builds that replace legacy systems. “I think definitely we want to lower barriers … all of us [agencies] have technical debt, all of us have legacy systems. Some of these solutions can help us secure those legacy systems better,” said Costello.
“One of the other areas that I think that we are pushing towards … that I’m rolling out for our field users and even our on-site staff [is] we’re not building our own networks anymore,” he said. “We’re doing everything over the internet. We have embraced the remote work and telework posture. We don’t always know where people are, and we don’t have a fear of public Wi Fi.”
