The Department of Homeland Security has a mission to keep the nation safe. This requires the ability to update and upgrade technological standards while maintaining 24/7/365 operations. DHS’ Office of the Chief Information Officer provides two major services. It acts as the CIO for the management zone, providing endpoints, services and application delivery to the CXOs (Chief Experience Officers) of DHS headquarters. The OCIO is also responsible for supplying enterprise continuity and connectivity to all their components.

Dustin Goetz is the Deputy Executive Director of Headquarters Operations for the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Chief Information Officer, (OCIO). In his capacity, all operations via internet connections go through his office. The OCIO holds the responsibility for their reporting and regulatory requirements. They have purview into what’s going on at the enterprise perspective, and can enforce cybersecurity policies, network availability and other operations.

“We have the full spectrum of applications that provide business logistics, which include your email, word processing, spreadsheet type of operations, anything that you would see as a standard load on a PC for user support, all the way to cloud hosting environments across the enterprise for DHS components where they can host their mission critical applications down at one of our data centers.” Goetz said on Federal Insights: Mastering IT Resilience: Strategies for Federal Continuity.

DHS CIO provides services on a local basis as well as enterprise while other components provide data framework and architecture. CTO provides standard enterprise architecture, but is focused on mission delivery, application and continuity of services.

Merging Cybersecurity Centers and Network Operations

Due to the increased growth of their mission, DHS OCIO created the Network Operations Security Center (NOSC) that merged numerous cybersecurity and network operations. This merger occurred four years ago when 13 to 14 different network and cybersecurity operations were merged to allow for one organization that had command and control across the environment that’s specific to headquarters but extends to the component departments.

The NOSC serves as a central location in monitoring operations of its system users, and enabling decreases incident response times and allows for a more consistent effort for tracking and maintaining IT infrastructure needs.

To evaluate the system and create metrics for measuring performance, Mr. Goetz and his team rely on SLAs. (Service Level Agreements). Working with their partners, those SLAs have stood as backup where cloud environments have encountered routing issues, and dropped services, and the SLA’s kicked in were able to remediate the issue at the time.

“We have to understand what the application is and what the availability requirements are, and that will dictate what type of environment they’re hosted in.” Goetz said. “So, if something happens to those applications, whether it be loss of network connectivity or the application that encounters some issues, so we’re not worried about them.”

Redundancy of network operations

Agencies like Customs and Border Protection, that are responsible for passenger and cargo processing are dependent on DHS OCIO’s ability to keep applications running 24/7. Mr. Goetz explains that his team has put in redundant hosts throughout the environments where they have facility redundancy. This allows for application fail over. These hosts are also physically separated so that if one location goes down, they fail over to a separate location.

“We also have path diversity, if their hosted in one location, we have multiple vendors providing service to the same location.” Goetz told The Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

One challenge faced by DHS and other organizations that use Software as a Service is keeping the system safe from updates that could wreak havoc like the airline outages earlier this year. DHS relies on automated testing protocols and makes sure that all of the SaaS capabilities are FedRAMP approved.

With continuous improvement a cornerstone of the DHS IT strategy, the department is looking ahead at ways to maintain operations and evaluate capabilities that will move the organization forward. That effort lies not just in the technological environment, but in the people that are part of the mission.

“We’re always looking for new ways, innovative ways of refining our environment. And that’s not necessarily an environment thing. It’s also a training and personnel matter, so we work closely with our commercial partners to look at the environment, identify how we can do things better, both through technology and through training. And I would say, if we ever stop doing that, then we’re all going to be in trouble because technology changes so fast it would end as it would be well for us,” Goetz said.

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