Peraton’s President of the Cyber Mission sector Tom Afferton represented the company at the Homeland Security and Defense Forum’s Cybersecurity Symposium in mid-July. The HSDF supports the homeland security mission and aims to serve as a beacon for collaboration between industry and government. This year’s symposium theme was Navigating AI, Zero Trust, and Data Security.
Tom moderated an esteemed panel, “Data for Improved Cybersecurity Outcomes”, alongside three other cyber leaders:
- Jim Langevin, former Democratic member of the House of Representatives from Rhode Island;
- Neil Ziring, technical director for research, National Security Agency (NSA);
- and Chris Butera, technical director for cyber, Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Department of Homeland Security.
During the discussion, Tom highlighted cyber modernizations and up-and-coming capabilities. He noted the importance of collaboration and the positives that stem from organizations and cyber defenders working together.
“It was great to see that collaboration play out in real time on our panel, which focused on the growing challenge of data management in cybersecurity. Congressman Langevin set the policy context, Chris explained mission drivers from CISA, and then Neil offered lessons learned from the NSA’s massive scale data management solution for signals intelligence,” Tom said.
The panel discussed data and cyber policies, improving cyber threat detection and awareness, and increased collaboration between the NSA and CISA, among many other topics.
Among those were the importance of:
- Providing incentives for software and hardware vendors to build security into their products, with an eye toward long-term resilience.
- Finding a way to create a regulatory harmonization, which will enable companies and critical infrastructure to meet straightforward federal requirements and eliminate the competing, and sometimes duplicative, reporting requirements.
- Emphasizing an aligned national cybersecurity strategy while maintaining a viable implementation plan within budget parameters.
- Creating a way for our analysts, engineers, and cyber workforce to improve their data science literacy.
- Delivering solutions to managing the growing volume, velocity, and variety of cyber security data to increase the effectiveness of cyber operators.
Peraton’s support as the forum’s premier partner and Tom’s leadership showcased our abilities in this arena. Peraton is applying its expertise in large scale data management – from supporting the signals intelligence enterprise to helping federal agencies in their efforts to increase cybersecurity in this ever-changing landscape.
