The series, “Accelerating the Mission with AI and Security,” produced by Scoop News Group for FedScoop and underwritten by Google for Government, invited leaders to share where they hope to see the most significant return on investment for AI implementation in the coming year.

Artificial intelligence to meet core mission needs

Workforce augmentation was a highly discussed use case for AI implementation in the series.

FEMA’s Office of the Chief Financial Officer is one agency that has been strategically working on a generative AI tool to improve mission efficiency.

Christopher Kraft, Assistant Administrator, Financial Systems for FEMA’s OCFO shared that his office is developing a proprietary generative AI tool – owned and operated by FEMA and DHS – to generate draft responses to budget requests that his team can review for accuracy.

The Department of Labor CISO Paul Blahusch discussed how his agency is leaning into AI with a dedicated AI office inside the Office of the CIO to help develop and implement tools and techniques to streamline workflows, which can translate into cost avoidance and improved programs. He referred to three AI implementation areas his agency is focusing on, including cybersecurity, back-office support, and assisting constituents in accessing services more quickly.

For agencies like the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, using AI as an augmented assistant has been developing even further over the past three years, according to CISO Jamie Holcombe, providing each examiner with an augmented intelligence system next to them.

“So, during its searches, it can bring up not just one thing but a myriad of things that pertain to the uniqueness of that patent application or trademark registration. So, you really have to think that the examiners don’t want one thing, they want a plethora of things to say, ‘yes,’ it is unique and novel, or ‘no, it’s not,’” Holcombe explains. “AI and generative AI has helped in that regard because each examiner has a customized version that just applies to them.”

Many leaders see generative AI as a way to improve standard workflow procedures. Department of Commerce CIO Andre Mendes, said that for tasks that are incredibly onerous, his department is looking at how AI can be used to break through some of the clutter.

“In HR processes, for example, position descriptions are not really that exciting, but at the end of the day, consume an enormous amount of people and time and resources, and where we can, I think, leverage AI to dramatically improve and optimize those environments,” he explained.

Improved security for federal data

Agencies like U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) are far along in their cloud migration strategies, which means that data security strategies must now shift to account for an explosion of digital resources.

“All the immigration data that has to be cataloged and identified and tagged is a monstrous task. And frankly, there is no easy button to push when you’re talking about the volume and scale of data that we have, and the amount of change that it goes through on even a daily basis,” shared USCIS CISO Shane Barney.

“We have, from a cybersecurity perspective, in my plans I am building, what we’re referring to as a security integration platform, which is an open source-based platform, and it has a whole AI/machine learning piece built into it based on open-source principles and practices, as well as some software platforms that will be integrated into the security program. And more on the threat hunting side of things where we’re looking for those abnormal changes in the environment that could indicate a breach.”

His agency leadership is waiting on further White House guidance on AI implementation but is working on foundational principles that can help the organization move forward with implementation plans quickly, referring to an open cybersecurity schema framework USCIS has been working on.

“I see it as the future. It’s the way we have to handle it; the future of cybersecurity is data,” said Barney.

This sentiment was echoed by other leaders who want to improve how they manage, store and analyze data to strengthen their agency’s security posture. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) CISO Robert Wood said that his agency is building a security data lake to minimize data silos.

According to Wood, generative AI models could play a more significant role in empowering the government workforce to ask plain language questions to get actionable insights from data if properly structured and react more quickly to security threats and vulnerabilities.

Other participants who shared their insights in this series included:

• David Shive, CIO, U.S. General Services Administration
• Guy Cavallo, CIO, Office of Personnel Management
• Dr. Kelly Fletcher, CIO, Bureau of Information Resource Management, Department of State
• Josh Lehman, Director, Office of Business and Customer Assurance, U.S. Food and Drug Administration
• Russell Marsh, Director, Cybersecurity Operations, National Nuclear Security Administration

This video series was produced by Scoop News Group, for FedScoop, and sponsored in part by Google for Government.

The post Federal leaders on accelerating the mission with AI and security appeared first on FedScoop.

In a new video series, government leaders shared how their organizations are keeping pace with security demands. The series, “Security Heroes: Defending the Dynamic Perimeter,” was produced by Scoop News Group, for FedScoop, and underwritten by Cisco.

A modern, or hybrid, network perimeter should now include next generation firewalls, policy enforcement points and capabilities like zero trust exchanges, according to Bobby Holstein, zero trust architect for the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“It’s not the volume of traffic that’s increasing per se, but the complexity. Operations departments will need to increase visibility into these complex traffic flows to be able to monitor performance. And this new secure sharpened edge that’s replacing this [traditional] firewall perimeter needs to be able to inspect SSL traffic for malicious content,” he explained.

Aaron Bishop, CISO at the Department of the Air Force, echoed that sentiment, adding that modernizing perimeter defenses aligns with both cloud and zero trust architecture strategies.

“Firewalls and packet inspection is a key aspect to layers in defense,” he says and determining where the boundary lays “is now the question of the hour” for most leaders.

“I challenge all of my authorizing officials to look at where’s the boundary I’m trying to protect and where is the data that I’m protecting within it. If I need to move that data, I need to understand where that protections go with that data,” shared Bishop.

Many of the government leaders interviewed in this series said that new perimeter defenses need to be more agile to enforce policies across modern infrastructure that includes micro-segmented workloads, encryption needs for data in transit and capabilities like secure access service edge.

Peter Romness, cybersecurity principal, CISO advisors’ office at Cisco, refers to modern firewalls as “security facilitators.” He explained that they have “become a container for security tools—things like antivirus, intrusion protection, improved intrusion detection. And they also facilitate behavioral monitoring to look for anomalies and known bad behavior. They also provide the ability to have a security tunnel to all of your endpoints and all of your assets in the multi cloud environment.”

Additionally, security defenses need to work at speeds that accommodate the increased volume of traffic, and the need to encrypt, decrypt and analyze that traffic as it flows across the environment.

Robert Wood, CISO at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services says what these changes are really driving “is a change in the way that we go about detecting and responding to issues in our environment,” which means that agencies need to have the resources to interface with all their endpoints and store the data so they can shift into more of a data-centric and engineering-centric workforce. “I think that’s the way of the future for the security industry, and it’s where we need to go.”

Hear more for our government leaders, and other participants in this video series, including:

• Anthony O’Neill, CISO, Massachusetts
• Craig Hurter, deputy CISO, Arizona
• Gerald Caron, former CIO, HHS OIG
• Jane Zipoli, federal civilian cybersecurity leader, Cisco
• Ryan Murray, deputy CISO, Arizona
• Tony Plater, CISO, Dept. of the Navy

This video series was produced by Scoop News Group for FedScoop and sponsored by Cisco.

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