By Emelie Rutherford
NASA must enhance its cybersecurity capabilities, the agency’s director told an industry-rich crowd yesterday.
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, speaking at the space agency’s first-ever Information Technology (IT) Summit, said he and NASA Chief Information Officer Linda Cureton agree more attention needs to be paid to fending off cyber attacks.
NASA, like the Pentagon, is one of “the most poked and prodded organization in the government as far as intrusions into what we do,” he said.
“So we’ve got a lot of work to do in the area of cybersecurity,” he said. Cureton is in the midst of building a “very, very strong team” to strengthen NASA against cyber vulnerabilities, Bolden said during the first day of the three-day event in National Harbor, Md.
The IT summit is intended to help government and industry share technology innovations regarding social networking, so-called “green IT”, innovation, infrastructure, operations, and IT security and privacy.
Bolden said President Barack Obama wants NASA to “come up with better ways to move the government forward on IT,” while saving money and consolidating activities. Bolden specifically cited a desire to focus on data-center consolidation, cloud computing, and green IT.
“We hope that events like this will help us to become a more integrated, more open and more collaborative organization,” he said, “so that we become incredibly transparent to the world, not just among ourselves, so people can look and find out anything they want to know about us that we want them to know very easily, whether it’s from an (Apple) iPad (hand-held computer) or a laptop or a desktop, or anything.”
Bolden charged NASA–an agency he said pushes boundaries–to assume leadership in the realm of IT.
“It’s (Cureton’s) and my goal to make sure NASA has the best IT organization in government,” he said.
We need to do many things differently than the way we do them today…in areas like IT, which is the backbone of much of our work,” he added.
Chief Information Officer of the United States Vivek Kundra, Bolden noted, has taken a keen interest in the Nebula cloud computing platform developed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.
“It’s systems like this that you all have developed and refined so that huge data sets can be easily shared among people who need them,” Bolden said, calling on the crowd of NASA, industry, and academic researchers to come up with more such innovations.
Bolden emphasized he wants academia’s help in helping industry and NASA workers develop better communication tools, and cited how NASA already considered to do well in making its information available to the public.
The NASA summit will continue through tomorrow, when Kundra is scheduled to speak.