Welcome to GTRA

Abstract:  Creating trust with your vendor is a lot like dating, it takes time, communication, and above all knowing what you want.

A relationship with a Cloud vendor built on a foundation of trust is a critical component to a mutually beneficial engagement for both parties.  While programs like FredRamp and countless other initiatives in the federal government have given incredible guidance & resources on how to select the right Cloud vendor (see the link to my PowerPoint presentation for more details on this), many still struggle with taking these recommendations and incorporating them into the vendor selection process.  In order to help ‘humanize’ the process and make it more relatable, I like to compare the process to dating.   A stretch?  You be the judge:

The federal bring-your-own-device (BYOD) strategy, a component of the federal digital strategy, is rapidly gaining ground. Having proven to increase efficiency and effectiveness, this movement, although not a mandate or policy, promises to be widely adopted at the federal level. In fact, a recent Forrester Consulting study indicates that 44% of employees now use smart phones at work; this is a 300% increase over the past three years. But despite its many benefits, this newly adopted ‘plan’, which allows for remote access to such things as the cloud and sensitive data, is causing tremendous security concerns among federal CISOs.  And as a result, we are now witnessing the need for a comprehensive BYOD security strategy that is multi-pronged in nature.

GTRA research with dozens of Federal IT leaders has identified three specific technologies which are at the core of a holistic approach to a mobile BYOD security strategy– MDM, NAC, and MAM – and will result in a truly secure BYOD environment.

Who said that securing our Federal IT supply chain was an impossibility? No one. But many -- from NASA to NIST -- are noting the tremendous challenges associated with such a feat.

The innovative and global nature of today’s IT environment, with its accelerated speed and vast scale, results in a very complex and diverse supply chain. This, coupled with the en-vogue purchasing of Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software makes the visibility and detectability of threats in the supply chain extremely difficult. The value chains alone in this process of creating and delivering a product/service can be up to 15 times removed from a department/agency. So the struggle doesn’t lie with understanding the primary contractor, it’s in knowing the end-to-end supply chain, with its endless contractors and subcontractors, and knowing exactly who along the way, ‘touches’ the product/service.

Abstract: As the Federal IT community moves deeper into the outsourced model, a CIO and their CISO’s security strategy must increasingly focus on contracts and supply chain management in order to mitigate their risk as buyers of commodity services

As the Federal IT community moves deeper into an outsourced model where applications, storage, networks, and services are procured from a myriad of providers and data is stored in a web of clouds and devices, the Federal IT Ecosystem has never been more complex. As a result of this decentralization, the threat of breaches and hacks has grown exponentially and CIOs are finding themselves with less control and reliant upon service providers who they must “trust” with security… a scary scenario for any executive to say the least. While the benefits and logic of this paradigm shift cannot be disputed, the priority of CIOs and their CISOs must now be on what they can do to mitigate their risk as buyers of what are increasingly becoming commodity services.

GTRA would like to highlight a Memo from the VA CIO on “Open Standard Protocols for VA Networks”, which marks an important shift if the agency’s strategy and shows its commitment to innovative uses of technology to support our nations veterans while navigating todays fiscal climate.

Summary: Despite high-profile media stories and even some arrests, a new study shows large numbers of people are still unaware that webcams can be hacked and used to spy on you! This statistic points to a more important problem where society is still not taking cyber security risks seriously… but what can we do to change that? 

Why the time is right for a massive network upgrade 

A real-time snapshot of the most frequently made comments by federal IT executives, some of which may come as a surprise.