Suzette Kent, federal chief information officer and a 2020 Wash100 Award recipient, told Federal News Network in an interview published Friday that the designation of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) as a center for cyber shared services recognizes DHS’ role in overseeing the marketplace for new security offerings.
“It formalizes their role to ensure that the products and services that we use across the entire federal government in this space not only meet standards, but they are part of a customer-centric dialogue,” Kent told the network’s Ask the CIO program. “So it’s important for both clarity and pace. We expect we will be able to bring new services to the marketplace faster and have more visibility to meeting standards.”
The move is part of the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) updated shared services strategy, which directs the government to come up with interagency standards and priorities for shared services and designate agencies to serve as quality service management offices.
DHS will start offering vulnerability management standardization, security operations center standardization, domain name service resolver service as a QSMO. Kent said the QSMO could help agencies gain access to industry or federal shared services or implement tools that could help them comply with the standards.
“This construct will actually help ensure when we do offer something in the marketplace, it has been fully vetted against those standards and agencies can move quickly and with confidence for that reason,” she added.
