Cybersecurity coordinator Howard Schmidt discusses cloud

January 29, 2010

White House cybersecurity coordinator Howard Schmidt has been on the job long, but he’s already met with federal chief information officer Vivek Kundra and federal chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra and is gearing up to be the administration’s lead on cybersecurity.

He talked extensively about his new duties during his first public appearance as cyber czar at the State of the Net Conference earlier this week.

He discussed a variety of topics, including cloud, and, of course, we bring you his thoughts on that today.

“I’m a big proponent of moving thing to the cloud, but moving it right.

I think we have tremendous economic benefits in doing so, but we have to make sure that we do it where we have specific agreements from a legal perspective on what it is that we’re putting [in the cloud], where it’s going to be, what are the authentication mechanisms, all the technical controls around it, as well as the international legal control.

So, as I work with Vivek, who has sort of been driving that — and Aneesh — my role is to make sure, as we’re looking at the technology components, asking the critical questions about the security.

So I see a very close working relationship on that as we move more in that direction.

I think the second part of that, when we start looking beyond the government space, and we obviously have to do that, as we start looking at the private sector.

That’s where we can really partner up and make sure that the things we’re going to be requiring as far as — what your requirements are going to be when you put things in the cloud, what things do you put in there generally, what things do you put in encrypted, where is it residing.

That’s where we can really develop sort of a standard on how we operate in the cloud, both in the government and private sector perspective.”


Federal News Radio’s Jason Miller reported more on Schmidt earlier this week. Read more:

Schmidt answers doubters as cyber czar

Privacy not taking back seat to security, cyberchief says