Chris LaPoint on Info Security and Automation in Government IT

Information security may be one of the key areas in government information technology that needs automation through continuous monitoring, Chris LaPoint, SolarWinds vice president of product management, said Monday.

He cited SolarWind’s latest public sector survey, which found that many agency IT departments do not consider infosec as a top skill slated for possible automation within the next five years.

Infosec ranked eighth in the list topped by server management, virtualization and cloud/software as a service, and figured as the number one IT skill in demand in three to five years.

“We’ve had past discussions around the need for automation of infosec disciplines via continuous monitoring and I think this underscores that need,” LaPoint told Josh Davis on the DLT Solutions blog.

According to LaPoint, one way for IT to evolve is to think through issues with a holistic approach and to be more adaptive of new skills, especially in risk management and security, network administration and system virtualization.

“As an increasing number of services become shared due to IT infrastructure convergence, the resulting abstraction makes it increasingly more difficult to monitor and manage from a security perspective,” LaPoint said.

“IT organizations will need automation tools because they won’t have the expertise to see things from all sides,” he added.

The New IT Public Sector Survey analyzed 148 responses to questions on how IT roles are affected by the new technologies coming into the agencies.