Recently, I attended an information security conference in which the term “situational awareness” was mentioned perhaps a hundred times in the course of an afternoon, by everyone from security analysts to chief information security officers. Listening to various conversations, these professionals were attributing capabilities to situational awareness that ranged from underwhelming (“it’s a pipe dream, doomed to failure”), to ridiculously over-wrought (“it will make human security analysts obsolete”).

The truth is somewhere in the middle. But more importantly, it’s time to get beyond the lip service and hype that’s been steadily growing around the term situational awareness and focus on what it really means for federal agencies and their partners.

The term situational awareness has long referred to the idea of “macro” visibility into complex systems, from air traffic control to battlefield command. But in the wake of recent cybersecurity attacks, the term now has a legitimate home in the world of information assurance. Keep reading →