Kurt DelBene, chief information officer (CIO) at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), said today that his agency is not spending enough on cybersecurity, and would benefit from being able to pay higher salaries in order to recruit and retain cyber experts.
At the 930gov conference and tradeshow hosted by the Digital Government Institute, DelBene explained that when it comes to the VA’s budget, “cyber is an important responsibility” that could benefit from more funding…
“The processes in the VA are incredibly complicated and complete in terms of quote-unquote, ‘assessing our cyber readiness.’ That’s a good thing. We also have defense in depth from multiple dimensions, which is a good thing as well,” he said. “It can’t take the place of having great cyber engineers looking at a particular system – for instance, at an ATO – and saying, ‘do I believe this is a secure system?’”
One of the transformations DelBene is trying to drive at VA is to ensure there is a security checkpoint. While cyber procedures and tools are great, DelBene said there has to be some sort of checkpoint, “whether it’s FITARA or the ATO process,” before putting systems on the network… Read the full article here.
