The Continuous Diagnostic and Mitigation (CDM) program has matured and broadened its offerings and full deployment of agency dashboards is on the horizon. In the last year, however, ominous high profile breaches in commercial and critical infrastructure networks have highlighted the continued importance of strong cybersecurity across federal networks.

In the wake of the pandemic, federal IT managers are faced with an increasingly complex cybersecurity environment with a broader potential attack surface as networks accommodate a more diffuse workforce. Adding even more to the complexity is the ongoing IT modernization, which is shifting data and resources to the cloud.

The President’s executive order, released in May, ups the game against cyber threats, naming prevention, assessment and remediation as top national cybersecurity priorities. The order calls for increasing the government’s visibility into cyber threats, as well as mandating basic cybersecurity practices across the federal government such as multi-factor authentication, encryption and end point detection. It also called for the establishment of a Cybersecurity Safety Review Board.

Attendees learned from program executives, industry executives and agency users about new capabilities and challenges and how agencies are dealing with the increased threats.

Attendees came away with an improved understanding of:

• How CISA is modernizing cybersecurity programs, services, and capabilities to be fully functional with cloud-computing environments with zero trust architecture
• The CDM program’s evolving dashboard ecosystem
• How the President’s mandate for agencies to update CDM agreements to secure object-level data is progressing, as well as efforts to gain more visibility into threat data
• Emerging tech’s role in cyber detection, including zero trust
• How new cybersecurity tools and services can be incorporated into CDM
• The 4 core capabilities of CDM—management of assets, data protection, network security, and user and access management