Last
week was a very productive and rewarding week for Beadwindow. Along with reaching out to community
members, we held our first “Hoot and Holler”, a bi-weekly gathering of
community members to share their intelligence and what they're experiencing on
their networks and systems. It was
a very well received event for those who attended and a wealth of information
for Beadwindow.
Having
worked in the government sector for most of my career, I am very familiar with
the constraints unique at local and state government levels. While working for a large state agency,
we were often short staffed, making it difficult to respond to problems that
were deemed “critical”. With the
importance of network security being punctuated by the events of 9/11, state
agencies across the board scrambled around looking for not only qualified
security people, but also money to acquire the necessary tools. I spent a lot of time sitting across
the desks from executives describing nebulous concepts like intrusion detection
when the first reaction was often, “I have a firewall, and I need a what?” It was particularly difficult dealing
with a lifetime bureaucrat with a sharp pencil and “no need for fancy
email!”
Recognizing
those challenges early on, state and local leadership in the IT sector came
together and pooled resources.
Department of Labor reached out to Health Services who reached out to
Public Safety and so on. This
collaborative effort was planting the seeds of interagency cooperation that
saved time, money, and helped spread the wealth of knowledge across the
enterprise. Today, these concepts
are commonplace and the sharing of resources is ubiquitous.
For
this new business model to work, leadership had to fill the “trust gap”, the
space between agencies that were all fighting for the same pot of
resources. Leadership had to be
challenged that working together not only saved money but increased access to resources
normally unaffordable or unattainable. This is the concept on which Beadwindow
is founded upon.
The
conversations had at the Hoot and Holler illustrates a need for governments to
reach out to others to compliment the tools and expertise already in
place. With budget cuts and
freezes in hiring, the left to right curve of available resources to cope with
TTP’s arcs sharply downward while the threats arcs sharply upward. Today, the onslaught of threats far exceeds the capabilities of
many governments, requiring agencies to look beyond their traditional
cooperative boundaries and reach out to new relationships for information and resources.
Beadwindow is designed to close the gaps and facilitate those conversations.
If
you’re a Beadwindow member, I encourage you to reach out to the Beadwindow community
partners for help. I heard several
examples of where sharing information with the rest of community could help
free resources in one place so they could be targeted elsewhere.
By
sharing with the community what you’re seeing on your networks, you are sharing
intelligence that benefits all members.
It really is the “pay it forward” model. You get out of it, what you put into it. You share the information in the portal
and in return it sparks conversation. In return, the likelihood of you gaining
information that is important to you that you’ve not seen before, increases
significantly.
To find out about how Red Sky can help
your organization, please reach out to me at rgamache@redskyalliance.org In the meantime, please learn
more about Red Sky @ www.redskyalliance.org or http://henrybasset.blogspot.com
Have a great week and remember – If
fighting is sure to result in victory, then you must fight!
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