DHS awards $276M contract for CDM dashboard

The Department of Homeland Security has awarded ECS Federal a $276 million contract to provide a governmentwide dashboard for the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program.

The Fairfax, Virginia, company will receive $7.7 million in the base year of the potential six-year contract, according to data on the Federal Procurement Data System. DHS’s goal is to improve how security information about federal networks is visualized for IT personnel in agencies across the government.

The General Services Administration’s FEDSIM office issued the contract on behalf of DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), formerly the National Protection and Programs Directorate.

The dashboard “will provide a total integrated technology solution for the CDM Federal and Agency dashboards, and will provide DHS with an integrated Dashboard solution for continuous monitoring and mitigation of cyber threats and vulnerabilities to the Federal .gov environment by expanding and enhancing the current instance of the Federal Dashboard through a suite of integrated hardware and software tools resulting in a ‘CDM Dashboard Ecosystem,'” a CISA official told FedScoop via email. “The enhancement of the CDM Dashboard through this [task order] will provide Federal agencies with a user-friendly and intuitive solution that can be utilized to visualize and prioritize risks and vulnerabilities in an Agency’s cybersecurity posture.”

The overall purpose, the official said, is to “provide actionable information to allow agencies to ‘fix the worst problems first'” across their networks.

CDM Program Manager Kevin Cox recently described the next steps for the program now that the initial contracts have been awarded and basic tool sets are available.

“It’s a question of: Will the CDM program become this wider sense of getting full cybersecurity solutions in place across all these different capability areas, or will we be more targeted on high-value assets, specific environments, etc.?” Cox said.

Cox also explained how the dashboard will open agencies up to new tools, analytics and business intelligence.

“If one agency has an incident, there’s a greater likelihood that spreads and gets to other agencies or that it’s happening at the same time across many agencies,” he said. “So we wanted to get that visibility.”