Federal CIO focused on cyber, smooth transition in months ahead

As the White House gets ready to “pass the baton” to the incoming Trump administration, Federal CIO Clare Martorana said she is focused on cybersecurity issues and making sure her team does everything it can for their replacements to be set up for success. 

Over the remaining two months of the Biden administration, Martorana said in an interview with FedScoop on the sidelines of the ACT-IAC CX Summit on Friday that cyber is her top area of focus because “you need security, engineering, [and] competencies when you are contemplating the problem set in the solution you’re trying to design.”

Martorana said the nation’s data are its “crown jewels,” and she’s especially mindful about protecting health care and social security data. Before her departure, Martorana said she wants to make sure that cybersecurity is not a “bolt-on thing at the end” but instead is a core component of product development for American citizens. 

Ultimately, she’s “really excited” about what’s possible from a tech standpoint for the incoming administration. 

“I think that the next couple years, with the innovation in AI and all of these other technical evolutions that we are going through — it’s such blue sky,” Martorana said. “I think the next four years, we’re going to accomplish extraordinary things.”

Because adversaries are constantly challenging the nation, Martorana said it’s “really important that we are thinking, as a community, of how to safeguard the assets that we have in order to make sure that we can enable whatever the future direction is of the mission sets that we’re supporting.”

Martorana has been vocal about the need for investments in cybersecurity, specifically with zero-trust implementation efforts across the federal landscape. During a panel at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit in Washington, D.C. in September, she emphasized the need to constantly work toward zero trust.

“For every agency, it is a journey, it is not a destination,” Martorana said at Billington. “You don’t get to a place called zero trust and it’s unicorns and rainbows. It is a journey that we have to be on and that also requires consistent funding.”

At the same event, she continued to advocate for the Technology Modernization Fund, noting that 83% of TMF investments “went to cybersecurity helping agencies get on the path to zero trust.”