Jane Edwards
Bill Rowan, vice president of public sector at Splunk and a four-time Wash100 awardee, said federal agencies looking to improve critical infrastructure through digital resilience and adoption of the National Cybersecurity Strategy should use next-generation observability tools.
“Observability addresses the cyber challenges posed to the public sector by quickly getting to the root cause of vulnerabilities, optimizing mitigation through live services, sharing active, contextual insights to aid incident prevention, and making better decisions for networks by auto-detecting new data,” Rowan wrote in a commentary published Friday on Federal News Network.
He said there are three steps federal information technology leaders should do to implement a strong observability strategy and the first two are creating a comprehensive data strategy that integrates sources of data across silos to improve visibility and combining tech tools into a comprehensive platform to remove silos.
The third step is working with other agency officials “to ensure they have a strong understanding of the value observability provides to an organization’s threat detection capabilities to achieve executive sponsorship to invest in the strategy,” Rowan noted.
The Splunk executive stated that observability tools could help agencies develop cyber resilience, deal with cyber incidents that lead to unplanned downtime and address poor performance while reducing costs.
