Guest Speaker Discusses Cyber Situational Awareness

Brig. Gen. Mitch Butikofer, USAF (Ret.), is vice president of Workforce Digital Services at USAA, one of America's leading financial services companies. He originally started his career with the U.S. Air Force, where he served as an operational leader at the Squadron, Group, Wing, and Numbered Air Force levels within the information technology, cybersecurity and cyberspace operations domains. In his current role, Gen. Butikofer leads the Workforce Digital Services team that aims to transform the USAA end-user technology experience. Cyber situational awareness and how we can prepare and secure our infrastructure was the main message expressed during the chapter's monthly luncheon. The general stated, "Daily, there are millions of intrusion attempts taking place at USAA, and the same governance is needed for protecting cyberspace for the government." Gen. Butikofer gave real-world strategic processes drawing from the Information Technology Infrastructure Library or ITIL. "As the Air Force looks to 'as a service' models, there are a lot of policy gaps, which will require significant changes of the current state on how the military manages their logs, vendors and systems." He emphasized the need for the right governance in cyberspace. There are three levels for cyber situational awareness: tactical, operational and strategic. Through these levels, there will be a need for managing and knowing your environment and the efforts that must be in place to gather the data and fix the gaps. "Industry and the Air Force must work together to support the congestion of cyberspace and the importance of cyber situational awareness. The investment of the right people to interpret the data is needed on all levels to understand what is happening on all domains."

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