Security shifting to enterprise

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2002/0218/web-omb-02-20-02.asp

By Diane Frank 
Feb. 20, 2002

New Office of Management and Budget requirements aimed at better
showing how agencies are securing individual systems are also
highlighting how security is changing as agencies focus more on the
enterprise, Kamela White, an OMB policy analyst, said Feb. 19.

In the past two years, agencies have had to indicate the percentage of
security funding included in the budget request for every information
technology system. This reporting requirement for Exhibit 53, the
portion of an agency's budget submission that details IT budget
requests, is intended to get agencies to focus on including security
in a system's planning.

Security funding across agencies has risen from $2.7 billion in fiscal
2002 to $4.2 billion in fiscal 2003. But some of that increase may
simply be caused by agencies finally complying with the requirement,
White said at the Digital Government Institute's Capital Planning and
Control seminar in Washington, D.C.

"For the '03 budget, all agencies reported IT security costs for all
their systems, and that was definitely not that case in '02," she
said.

This demonstrates that the push to get agencies to develop enterprise
architecture plans and complete capital planning and investment
control processes is working, White said.

The focus on enterprise solutions, however, now includes enterprise
security, including agencywide public-key infrastructures for
transaction authentication. Such security investments are not tied to
a particular system, making it hard to work them into the Exhibit 53
report, one agency official pointed out.

This enterprise issue came up several times during the evaluations of
agencies' budget requests, White said.

Although OMB has not yet developed guidance, agencies should make sure
to fully explain any such apparent discrepancies in their budget
documentation, including any methods to prorate enterprise security
into the requests for specific systems, she said.

[Related link: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/memoranda/m00-07.html ]



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