ÎÞÓÇ´«Ã½

Federal agencies are currently at a critical inflection point as they seek to modernize their IT architectures and cyber tools to better meet the ever-evolving threats to the nation’s critical data, supply chain, and infrastructure. To be successful, they'll need to expand their efforts beyond mere compliance and implement proactive, preventive security operations with an emphasis on vulnerability management and persistent threat hunting.Ìý

As today’s threat actors become bolder and more sophisticated, government personnel will need access to the most reliable and most current tools, capabilities, and data available. Meeting the mission will require overcoming some significant challenges, but each of these challenges can also be seen as a potential opportunity.

• Barriers to cooperation and visibility. Traditional waterfall-based methodologies for delivering cyber capabilities can often be too siloed and inflexible to meet evolving threats. Agencies should take full advantage of this transition period to adopt advanced methodologies such as the Scale Agile Framework (SAFe®) that are far more adaptable. Stakeholders and end users should be engaged as early as possible in the development process, and teams, such as operations and maintenance (O&M), should be given all the information and other resources necessary to effectively deploy, operate, and troubleshoot the tools that are developed.Ìý
• Need to accommodate new data types. Historically, sensor data has been collected largely from physical, on-premises locations where agencies connect to the internet, but data and processing are increasingly being shifted to the cloud. In addition, perimeter data is not as effective for identifying threat actors that are already inside of the environment. Hence, agencies will need to expand their ability to capture and enrich data from the cloud as well as from endpoint detection and response tools that sit on the endpoints to intelligently correlate the data and make it available to analysts.
• Shift to hybrid and multicloud. The move to the cloud offers compelling benefits, including reduced infrastructure costs and effort, and on-demand compute power to perform analytics. As agencies shift to a hybrid and multicloud architecture, they should take the opportunity to ensure that operators and analysts upskill to be able to manage the new applications and cloud-based solutions that form the foundation of an effective modernized threat-hunt solution.

To meet these challenges, federal agencies—including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), with its central role in protecting networks and data across the government IT ecosystem—will need the support of a highly flexible and integrated team of teams, with an extensive cyber background, that can develop and deliver capabilities in record time. ÎÞÓÇ´«Ã½ is an integrator with a deep understanding of every aspect of the cybersecurity mission, from threat hunting and vulnerability assessments to enterprise-scale data management and analytics.

SAFe Agile DevSecOps—A Fully Integrated Solution

ÎÞÓÇ´«Ã½â€™s SAFe Agile DevSecOps strategy is designed from the ground up to eliminate barriers between silos. We involve the end users from the beginning to document their requirements and understand their priorities. We demo new tools for the O&M teams, provide them with all the resources needed for implementation, and work through the deployment process with them so they’re successful.Ìý

This strategy helps ensure that the changes instilled go beyond just implementing new tools and technology to also include cultural change that fosters a fully integrated team working in unison toward a shared goal. Our strategy has proven successful on numerous engagements, including work performed out of our Charleston Innovation Hub (Product Factory), ÎÞÓÇ´«Ã½â€™s center for performing large-scale, SAFe® agile delivery of capabilities for customers like the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

A Uniquely Secure Foundation

ÎÞÓÇ´«Ã½ is one of the nation’s top cyber contractors, serving clients in the commercial, civil, defense, and intelligence communities. The breadth of our customer base allows us to take the best practices and the most advanced tools from the commercial space and combine them with our defense and intelligence community roots to offer the most advanced, yet still highly secure, solution.

• We're currently working with a national agency and the Department of Defense (DOD) in developing an advanced malware analysis platform, performing advanced proactive threat hunt, and conducting very large-scale defense cyber operations.Ìý
• We’ve partnered with 18 of the top 25 global financial institutions to transform their cybersecurity defenses, including building secure platforms for developing and deploying new capabilities in pre-approved, accredited, hardened environments, and have also modernized and currently support more than 130 Security Operations Centers and Cyber Fusion Centers for commercial clients.
• As the current prime on the Continuous Diagnostic and Mitigation contract, ÎÞÓÇ´«Ã½ is responsible for facilitating the delivery of compliance data from all endpoints, including performing large-scale sensor deployment; working with numerous vendors; maintaining access and managing licenses; and purchasing, deploying, and maintaining all necessary tools and capabilities, as well as replacing them as appropriate as part of technology refresh.

Automation and Advanced Cyber Analytics

The most effective modern cyber solutions employ automation across the workflow, from development to deployment, accreditation, scanning, and monitoring. Eliminating manual effort wherever it's possible and safe to do so helps control costs and increase accuracy. ÎÞÓÇ´«Ã½ has extensive capabilities and experience using automation and advanced cyber analytics to normalize, enrich, and correlate sensor data, including new cloud-data types. Here's how we're bringing our expertise to the table:

• ÎÞÓÇ´«Ã½ is working with DOD to deliver advanced cyber analytics capabilities, including applying artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) to detect threats at machine speed.
• We're also implementing cyber automation capabilities such as the Security Orchestration Automation Response (SOAR) to remediate threats based on the alerts generated.
• For our clients in the intelligence community, we’ve been developing advanced threat-hunt platforms to perform malware analysis.Ìý
• We have made significant investments in Low Code/No Code technologies, both in-house and through our acquisition of Liberty IT Solutions, and we have extensive experience helping government agencies implement solutions such as ServiceNow to facilitate workflows across the lifecycle, from requirements gathering to development, deployment, ticketing, dashboarding, and automation.

Traditional methods of delivering cyber capabilities are rapidly becoming outdated, but many organizations attempting to adopt the latest technologies have struggled to implement them correctly. Very few companies know how to bring together all the necessary elements—advanced infrastructure design and fielding, modern software development and deployment, and enterprise-scale analytics—in a smart and effective manner.Ìý

ÎÞÓÇ´«Ã½ has the know-how, experience, and highly cleared staff to help federal agencies undertake this journey. Our background and capabilities in SAFe® Agile and DevSecOps combined with our proven performance in cyber defense and cyber data fusion make us the right choice to support federal agencies in fulfilling their mission.