This past summer, the federal government’s Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program, better known as CDM, reached an important milestone. Nearly all 23 major agencies covered under the Chief Financial Officers Act were connected to a cyber security dashboard housed at the National Cyber Security and Communications Integration Center.
The dashboard plays an important role in the CDM process. The data used not only helps federal agencies analyze their own cyber security environment, but it provides the Department of Homeland Security with an extra set of eyes on the federal ecosystem as a whole.
The CDM program calls on federal agencies to take control of their networks. The four phases require agencies to understand what is on their network, who is on the network, what is happening on the network, and how that data will be protected. As federal agencies continue to complete these phases, they gain more and more awareness of the overall state of their network.
