The profusion of nasty, new cyber threats — nation state and sponsored state attacks, etc. — is lighting a fire under the seats of public sector information technology professionals. They are beginning to move uncharacteristically fast to new, tighter security technology, and finding it — somewhat ironically — in the cloud.

“It’s long over due,” said John Wood (pictured), chief executive officer of Telos Corp.

Even after for-profit enterprises shook their cloud-security jitters, government agencies largely remained behind. The situation is changing thanks to a number of high-profile cloud adopters setting an example for fellow public sector entities, Wood explained. The Central Intelligence Agency’s decision to move to the Amazon Web Services Inc. cloud in 2013 was a bellwether.

“It kind of made everybody stand up and take notice — you know, if the most security-conscious organization in the world was considering it, why aren’t I?” he said

Wood spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the AWS public sector headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. They discussed how the cloud can make government agencies more secure. 

Getting on the same cybersecurity page

“I believe that the leadership within the government is ready for this change,” Wood said. AWS’ Commercial Cloud Services, or C2S, and Secret Commercial Cloud Service, or SC2S, are the “secret” and “top secret” clouds, respectively, Wood explained. The intelligence community — including its military components — have been working together to assess the security features of these clouds. The group of 38 assessors clearly see the benefits and are gaining confidence that the data is protected and are now closer to reciprocity than ever before.

A common vernacular for cybersecurity pros has hurt attempts to build expertise and strong security standards and systems in the past. The signing of the president’s executive order on cybersecurity is now mandating the adoption of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework.

“It provides you with a common language, but on the on the other hand, it’s 1,100 controls. So as a result, automation’s going to be key to making sure that people can work with each other and then making sure that the adoption actually takes off,” Wood said.

Rusty, old legacy IT in government agencies is also pretty darned expensive, in addition to being poorly secured. Eighty percent of IT spend is going back to maintenance, according to Wood. By contrast, with commercial customers, it’s 20 to 25 percent.

“It basically means that the government has a lot of legacy systems, which means that there’s a lot of threats,” Wood said, adding that moving to cloud kills both bugs with one swat.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations at the AWS public sector headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.

Photo: SiliconANGLE