Talking IT Ops & Cybersecurity with Don Waymire

Don Waymire, an IT executive at Booz Allen, thinks of IT operations and cybersecurity as essential to each other. But at many organizations that’s a connection that must be deliberately forged. "In the cyber and IT ops space, all efficiencies start with constant communication and collaboration between teams,” Don says. “It’s important to foster a culture of cross-functional partnerships to establish lines of communication that otherwise might not exist.”

Keeping cybersecurity top of mind—and his colleagues in cyber close at hand—is one of the many ways Don and his teams of IT operations experts keep their clients’ critical mission systems running at the highest levels of reliability and efficiency.  

We recently spoke with Don to learn more about why IT excellence requires continuous collaboration between operations and cyber teams. Read on for the insights he has learned from more than two decades in the field. 

In today’s connected world, maintaining 99.99% uptime for the critical systems we manage is essential for mission outcomes and business operations. To achieve this, first and foremost is mission knowledge—a fundamental understanding of what the agency is trying to achieve. We have strategies to minimize downtime, but this needs to start during the architecture and design of the application or system. Factoring in the availability and security requirements into the design of the system is key. Examples of this include adopting a redundancy strategy using the cloud to allow for automatic failover in the event of an outage; having a robust monitoring and alert system in place to notify users of any potential issues; and ensuring regular maintenance is completed with patches, security fixes, and updates to ensure optimal performance of the systems and prevent vulnerabilities. Finally, our teams regularly test our plans through simulated incidents to ensure rapid response and minimal service disruption.

The connection between IT ops and cybersecurity is critical to ensure the IT infrastructure is secure, efficient, and resilient. IT ops supports the IT infrastructure—things like networks, servers, and storage systems, whereas cybersecurity makes sure all of the IT infrastructure components are securely configured and monitored to mitigate threats. Government agencies rely heavily on their IT infrastructure to fulfill their mission and deliver services to customers, and that infrastructure includes a mix of on-premises and cloud systems and thousands of servers, network devices, and applications to support mission-critical functions. A strong collaboration between IT ops and cybersecurity teams allows organizations to improve their overall cybersecurity posture, protect against evolving threats, and maintain high availability to end users. 

In the cyber and IT ops space, all efficiencies start with constant communication and collaboration between teams. It’s important to foster a culture of cross-functional partnerships and establish lines of communication that otherwise might not exist. In the traditional DevSecOps environment, there is a strong desire to keep pushing security to the left in development efforts. As applications move to deployment, coordination and communication between security and operations needs to increase—it is absolutely essential to ensuring a smooth and secure deployment. 

Automation is another way to drive efficiencies. Identifying repetitive tasks that can be automated helps to increase the efficiency of the systems, quality of the data, and security posture. Agencies can automate software development, patch management, configuration tasks, and system provisioning to reduce the need for manual effort and help eliminate errors. On the operations side, there are self-healing mechanisms that will automatically remediate common issues, maintain IT infrastructure health without the need for human involvement, and auto-escalate major incident management (MIM) incidents. On the cyber side, the Risk Management Framework (RMF) can be automated to help support continuous monitoring, and automation tools can streamline Authority to Operate (ATO) submission, review, and status of requests. And, ultimately, automation supports agencies in their ability to be proactive in ensuring the systems are functioning properly and in staying ahead of the threat landscape.

Successful IT and cybersecurity outcomes can be tracked with various key performance indicators (KPI). These indicators help to reflect the effectiveness, efficiency, and impact of the operations. Ultimately, high availability and reliability are the goals—minimal downtime and minimal service disruptions. That is what shows the IT ops and cyber operations are effectively managing and maintaining the agency’s IT infrastructure and systems. Some benefits include the following:

• Stronger Risk Management: Increases the number of long-term ATOs by improving confidence and understanding of system risk, which will ultimately drive toward a state of continuous monitoring
• Strengthened Cyber Operations Posture: Increases percentage of vulnerabilities mitigated and reduces instances of unauthorized software on the network
• Healthy Asset Management and Contingency Planning: Establishes an effective asset management program and streamlines processes to review and validate contingency plans
• Increased Customer Satisfaction:  Improves the number of averted outages, reducing mean time to detect/respond/time between failures (MTTX times), and increasing visibility to application performance
• Reduced IT Operations Costs and Technical Debt: Increases levels of automation at all applicable areas and levels, reducing processing times for key operations workflows