Page 25 - FCW, July/August 2018

to help with cyber hygiene measure- ments. So that gives us about a year and a quarter, starting in July, to really clean everything up and make it as use- ful as possible.”
Another participant, however, expressed concern that the data cleanup would “get lost in the shuffle. During Phase 1, there wasn’t consis- tent information sharing, and when you have different integrators, that’s going to be natural and that’s obviously where DHS has to step in. If we’re try- ing to have apples-to-apples compari- sons among agencies and everybody’s doing it differently, we’re just not going to be there.”
Another countered that data qual- ity would not get overlooked because one of the foundational requirements of DEFEND is that integrators “make sure these data quality concerns are
being addressed from the start of the contract.”
‘Working toward a common, shared purpose’
The group also discussed cybersecurity priorities and
the often overwhelming amount of work that remains.
“We’re not going to be able to
get it all done in one year or
even three years,” a partici-
pant said. “It’s going to take
us likely beyond the six years
that we have under DEFEND.
But we expect in that six years
to make great strides to really tighten up cybersecurity across the federal enterprise.”
Fortunately, the DEFEND task order incorporates the ability for integrators to add resources as needed. “They can
scale up mobile teams, cloud teams, boundary protection teams,” one executive said. “So they’ll have addi- tional resources they can bring to the agencies, maybe more so than the original integrators had at the begin- ning. There are going to be logjams
July/August 2018 FCW.COM 21