DISA to Release Data Strategy Soon, Needs Industry Help

As the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) embraces a more data-centric vision, the agency is developing policies for enhanced data management and identifying necessary technical capabilities to support agency operations, and improved decision making and operability for warfighters, said Caroline Kuharske, DISA acting chief data officer, on April 27 speaking with Michelle Lee, director, Threat Intelligence at Lumen Technologies, during AFCEA’s TechNet Cyber conference in Baltimore.

“We started in October and for the first 100 days of being a real office, with investments and resources, people and a mission, we decided to take a step back look at what we've been doing in that first hundred days to see if it's the right fit,” Kuharske stated. “So, we created a DISA Data Strategic Implementation Plan.”

That guiding document for DISA’s data future, which is presently being reviewed by senior leaders, should be released in the next few weeks, the CDO said. Information technology and data specialty companies’ input and proposed solutions will be needed as DISA pivots to becoming more data centric, she emphasized. In particular, the agency is looking at advanced data management approaches.

“[It will be] out soon for you to see where we are going to need partnerships with industry,” Kuharske shared. “With our data revolution we have data everywhere but it's all disparate. It's in different silos. It's being used differently. It's being called different things, so that data normalization, data tagging, sensitivity labeling, things of that nature are all things that are in that DISA data strategy to really start getting after that. I think it is a great partnership opportunity with not only our mission partners but with industry.”

A focus of the data strategy will be to employ artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), Kuharske said.

“The governance that comes from that labeling, it [will enable us] to put the data where it needs to be and strategically manipulate it so that whenever we are having to make a decision or we do have an adversary knocking on our door, we can utilize that AI and ML to redirect that adversary away from our high value data and our high value assets,” she said. “Weaponizing the data to do the actions for us to really be able to posture services and mission capabilities to flawlessly flow into an AI/ML type of availability and leveraging our current existing programs to maybe evolve them into more automated and orchestrated capabilities, that's a lot of what is coming out of my office.”

At Lumen, the company is leveraging data to advance forward threat intelligence and applying machine learning to deliver actionable intelligence. In particular, the company is examining open-source and Internet-related data.

“We see so much data come across the Internet and really how do we leverage that data to empower our security workforce to able to deliver those actionable insights to our customers and keep the Internet ‘clean’ [and void of threats],” Lee stated.