Navy Commander Kevin Blenkhorn, a computer sciences professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, works with his Joint Services teammates during the U.S. Army’s ‘Cyber Center of Excellence’, Fort Gordon in Augusta, Ga., hosted a multi-service ‘NetWar’ to show, and build, cyber Warrior capabilities Tuesday, June 10. (Georgia Army National Guard photo by Staff Sgt. Tracy J. Smith)
NATO EDGE 2024 — In order for the alliance to be better equipped at dealing with cyber threats, NATO is in the process of standing up a new cyber center — to go online by 2028 — that will meld parts of its various cyber entities into one, a NATO official told Breaking Defense this week.
“This center will allow us to better combine the way in which we are monitoring the threat, the way we are controlling the attack surface of the enterprise [and] the way we are managing the risk,” Stefano Piermarocchi, head of the Enterprise Cyber Risk Management portfolio within NATO’s chief information office, said in an interview. “So it’s a way to facilitate the conduction of certain processes and make sure they are at the pace of the security for the enterprise itself.”
Coined the NATO Integrated Cyber Defense Center, the joint entity will combine NATO’s Cyber Security Center, Cyber Operations Center and Cyber Threat Analysis Branch, as well as parts of the CIO’s office, Piermarocchi said. He added that the center plans to engage industry partners from across the alliance as well.
“The idea of the center is to facilitate the dialogue with the industry, and to be sure that we’re able to speed up certain processes, to increase our ability to communicate … or to have a really more concrete dialogue with nations,” he said.
Brig. Gen. Sam Raeves, who serves as the assistant chief of staff of J6 Cyberspace at NATO, also expressed the benefits of standing up such a center, saying that combining these existing cyber entities with industry will create “cohesion” in terms of cyber operations.
“Putting all those elements together, instead of having them dispersed all over the alliance, it will really improve the situation and the cohesion of information sharing,” Reeves said during an interview on the sidelines of the NATO Edge 2024 conference.
There will be multiple centers located across NATO countries, Piermarocchi said. But the headquarters will be in Mons, Belgium, NATO CIO Manfred Boudreaux-Dehmer, said during a panel at the event.
“It will be set up as a physical colocation space where people can sit together if an incident happens, people are working together real time,” Boudreaux-Dehmer said. “That’s a major, major building block in getting us working together more closely and supporting each other in this colocation place.”
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Though the idea to stand up such a center was approved by the alliance, Piermarocchi said the center likely won’t be stood up until 2028 as more logistics like hiring need to be sorted out among the 32 countries.
“There is a need to recruit other people, to have other people on board, because this is one of the challenges that we have, we cannot do all the work that the center has to do, including, for example, 24/7 capabilities without hiring additional resources,” he said.
