Centralize Cybersecurity? Secretary Pritzker Doesn’t Think So

/by

Last month, Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker appeared in front of the President’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity and the subsequent article in FedScoop caught my attention.

She is very concerned that the President’s Commission could mandate that all US Federal Government information technology be consolidated under one organization’s authority. According to Secretary Pritzker, a mandate like this would make it difficult for an agency’s leadership to enforce cyber security initiatives addressing their specific needs.

In other words, one size does not fit all.

Is she correct to be worried? It may be worthwhile to turn our eyes to our northern neighbor, Canada, where this consolidation is taking place right now. Canada frequently looks to our government before adopting a new practice. In this instance we can learn from their experience.

Currently, the Canadian government, including their equivalent of the Department of Defense and Intelligence community, is reorganizing and consolidating many small agencies into fewer larger agencies called Portfolios. This consolidation is not just on the cyber security front; the entire government is moving from 47 individual agencies to 28. This reorganization and consolidation is causing a lot of internal uproar since many former agency CIOs and CISOs now have to report to someone else. Former leaders no longer have a say in what they used to manage, with the authority moved to others higher up in the organizational chart. Additionally, the Canadian government is consolidating their 308 data centers into 40 to 80 super data centers. This will be a huge undertaking similar to our consolidation into Trusted Data centers. It is still too early to know if it will be worth the growing pains. But, I wonder if Canada’s governmental eye is being taken off the cyber ball.

Secretary Pritzker raises some interesting questions that we should fully consider:

  1. Is over- or under- centralization a root cause of the government’s less-than-perfect response to cybersecurity?
  1. Where should “authority, responsibility and capability” (and budget!) for improving cybersecurity lie? A White House cyber czar? The new federal CISO? The Cabinet Secretary level?
  1. Is a hybrid approach best? A mix of centralized cybersecurity services with agency specific toolsets?
  1. Should there be a united fedciv.gov network like .mil? A unified email system for all fedciv employees?
  1. As the Canadians are doing, would it be better to reorganize cybersecurity efforts independently of the agencies they serve rather than doing everything all at once?

All in all, there are a lot of similarities between what is currently happening in Canada and the organizational recommendations that may come out of the President’s commission. I’m suggesting the US could learn a lot from our northern neighbor and ally.