On April 2nd, DoD CIO Teri Takai addressed the audience at the “Security Through Innovation Summit” presented by Intel Security and FedScoop. Consolidation and standardization were the core themes of her comments as she answered questions from moderator Nigel Ballard, Director of Federal Marketing at Intel.

Impact of New NIST Security Standards

When asked about how the adoption of NIST Security Standards would impact vendors selling to the DoD, Takai stated that the intent was to make compliance easier for vendors. “Our intent was to not have a situation where [vendors] have to comply with a set of NIST standards that are different from DoD standards.” Takai added that this is not the “dramatic shift” that some may see it as. Rather, she views it as “an evolution of where we want to go” and stated that the DoD is “very committed to the adoption of the NIST standards.”

The “evolution” is to create consistency and common core standards throughout the government. Takai addressed another aspect of this evolution, FedRAMP, which provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. Takai stated that DoD, DHS, and GSA are “all in lockstep” on FedRamp initiatives.

Federal IT Procurements in the Future

Another initiative in consolidation and standardization is the Joint Information Environment (JIE), which will consolidate the various DoD networks into a single shared architecture. Takai called JIE a “huge transformation effort” and used the Integrated Electronic Health Record program as an example of how JIE will affect federal IT procurements in the future. “We have a number of RFPs out on the iEHR that we’re working on – those will all be built on a premise of JIE, which will be different from the way we put those out in the past.” Takai added that the DoD will be evaluating “the way that we’re going to go into major procurements of information technology in the future, whether that’s the services, very large applications or systems … in the future that will all be built on the assumption that whatever we build will be built on JIE.”