Cyberspace - Chief Information Officer’s Views

Navy CIO: Ten Important Areas in Cyber Space

By John Ohab

March 21, 2010 - The Navy Chief Information Officer, Robert Carey, runs a fantastic blog for those interested in information technology and management, and how they impact the Department. He recently identified his top ten most important areas in cyber space for 2010. What do you think? Did he leave anything out?

1. Decision Making and Governance: We continue to work toward a more agile decision-making model while ensuring proper alignment across resources, requirements, acquisition, policy and operations. We are striving to perform like an enterprise, so we can leverage the buying power of the DON or DoD where appropriate. This will ensure that we maximize the value of our IT budgets using Enterprise Architecture as the main tool to drive interoperability and cost management.

2. Networks/NGEN: The Department is forging ahead toward closure of the current NMCI contract and moving closer toward NGEN. In addition, the legacy environment is shrinking and being enveloped by the present NMCI environment.

3. Cybersecurity Capability/Investment Model: We are also working toward a Cyber Capability Model combined with the appropriate metrics and investment guidance to ensure that our resources are placed where they are absolutely necessary.

4. Enterprise Mobility: The power of the smart phone and our ability to securely connect to the network and information needed to perform our jobs is expanding exponentially. This is freeing our workforce from the Industrial Age model of the “desk” and allowing us to securely work from anywhere.

5. Web 2.0/Social Media/Collaboration: No longer are social media tools a new phenomenon, but rather standard ways to share information. We will continue to look for ways to leverage these tools to make better decisions more quickly and efficiently.

6. Privacy: With so much of our sensitive information being used to conduct everyday transactions, we must be even more vigilant about protecting personally identifiable information (PII). Deployment of data at rest encryption continues to help mitigate the impacts of lost and stolen devices.

7. NNE/Cloud Computing: We are marching toward the Enterprise User concept where we can engage the network (the Global Information Grid) from any device and access our information.

8. Cyber/IT Workforce Skills: Everyone is a cyber warrior and as such will require better and different training. The Cyber Age is here, and we must accelerate our knowledge of the network as a tool to perform our work.

9. Identity Management: We are striving for an identity-based physical and logical access standards-based model that is interoperable across the Federal Government and with our coalition partners.

10. Critical Infrastructure Protection: We are working to operationalize a new model that will provide for leveraging assets from the Navy and Marine Corps to ensure that the Naval mission can be accomplished when tasked.