Phyllis Schneck, deputy under secretary-cybersecurity and communications at the Department of Homeland Security’s National Protection and Programs Directorate, said today at a meeting of the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee that ongoing efforts to reorganize NPPD won’t serve to diminish its role in creating better cybersecurity for government civilian networks.

She said the reorganization will leave intact DHS’s National Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Center while joining NPPD’s critical infrastructure protection mission more closely to its cybersecurity mission.

“Cybersecurity is not going away, it is not being eaten by infrastructure protection,” she said.  “I am trying to dispel all of the rumors I have heard over the past six months.”

She also hinted that NPPD is contemplating a name change – DHS under secretary Suzanne Spaulding has also hinted at the same notion – saying, “Cyber Infrastructure Protection sounds better than NPPD.”

Elsewhere at today’s NSTAC meeting, Lisa Hook, chief executive officer at Neustar, Inc., and co-chair of NSTAC’s big data analysts subcommittee, said the subcommittee has received about 40 briefings thus far in its efforts to prepare a report on big data analytics, and said the report will look at topics including cybersecurity and critical infrastructure, kinetic attacks, and national disasters.  The subcommittee is due to issue its report in May 2016.

White House cybersecurity coordinator Michael Daniel said the White House will be looking to engage NSTAC to prepare a series of reports that will help the Obama and subsequent administrations with issues including how technology trends are likely to impact government agencies in the coming years.  He said he planned to make a request to NSTAC along those lines “over the next couple of weeks.”

NSTAC members also heard a presentation on high-performance computing and big data analytics, and the expected growth in the interaction of the two.  Mark Seager, chief technology officer-high performance computing at Intel Corp. said the two fields are “deeply related” as simulation sciences and actual sciences grow closer together.

James Brase, deputy associate director for computation at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory said the convergence of high-performance computing and big data analytics could be a boon for cybersecurity as it will allow deeper predictive insight into how networks can deal with intrusions.

Mark McLaughlin, CEO at Palo Alto Networks, said that NSTAC’s meeting in May 2016 will be held in the Silicon Valley region of California.  A specific meeting date has not been set.  – John Curran, john.curran@wolterskluwer.com

Courtesy TRDaily