FCW Insider: September 13, 2021

The latest news and analysis from FCW's reporters and editors.

Report: Fostering a diverse cybersecurity workforce

Experts at an Aspen Institute event explained some roadblocks to cultivating a diverse cybersecurity workforce and offered potential solutions, including putting less reliance on formal certification.

What 9/11 looked like inside the federal IT community

Mark Forman, the former administrator of the Office of E-Government and widely considered the first federal CIO, shares his recollections of the attacks of September 11, 2001.

ICYMI: DOD's silence on CMMC is worrying industry, trade groups claim

Months of silence from the Defense Department on the status of the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification program is palpable and stirring unease among defense contractors, trade associations say in a letter to Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks.

Quick Hits

*** In a post on LinkedIn, Ron Ross of the National Institute of Standards and Technology teed up "bold changes" to the agency's flagship cybersecurity guidance, NIST SP 800-160. The revisions will reflect "the explosive growth of cyber-physical systems," Ross wrote. "The common ground we have discovered is that we are all engineering systems that must be designed for the emergent properties we wish to achieve and to control the behaviors and outcomes of those systems while under adversity."

*** Microsoft is reorganizing its federal team according to a report in ZDNet. Effective October 1, Microsoft's federal team will report up to company's Azure division.