I’ve been fortunate enough to serve my country as a member of the Senior Intelligence Service (SIS) in the Central Intelligence Agency. As a kid growing up in northern Minnesota, a career at the CIA seemed an impossible dream, and yet I was able to serve my country and our allies around the world for 35 years.  

All too quickly, I found myself ready for retirement from the government but not ready to retire. I had developed so many technical and leadership skills that I was ready for another challenge, but I was unsure of how to transition to the private sector. In the CIA we had a saying, “We are the nation’s first line of defense. We accomplish what others cannot accomplish and go where others cannot go.”

I couldn’t go from a role like that to just any job. I needed to work in an environment that was making changes in the way businesses function, a company that embraced the same mentality that nothing is too hard. At the same time, I wanted to join an organization that would respect my experience, offer new growth opportunities, and be filled with smart, quality people.

I’d met David Erickson, the CEO of Forward Networks, and I knew this company was delivering a new category of technology, which is challenging to say the least. David expressed interest in having me join the company to focus on federal strategy and security. Now that I’ve been with the company for nearly 3 months, I know I made the right choice. The passion reminds me of my team at the CIA with a focus on innovation, commitment, collaboration, and integrity. My experience is valued and I’m already able to contribute to the company in a meaningful way. 

I see the mission at Forward Networks as, “We are the network’s first line of defense, we accomplish what other companies cannot accomplish, and we go where other companies have not gone.” Being part of this is exciting. The company is financially stable having just closed $50 million in Series D funding, and we’re hiring.

If you’re serving in the federal sector today as a government employee or a contractor, we’d like you to consider joining us – your experience will be valued, and you’ll continue to be challenged. Click here to explore career opportunities. 

Cybersecurity is front and center as part of our national defense strategy. Civilian networks responsible for life-sustaining services such as water and power must be protected with the same vigor as networks that host sensitive data.

To accomplish this the Department of Homeland Services developed the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program in 2012. CDM supports government-wide and agency-specific efforts to provide risk-based, cost-effective cybersecurity solutions for protecting federal civilian networks by providing financial assistance to civilian government agencies as they focus on improving their security posture by:

• Reducing agency threat surface
• Increasing visibility into the federal cybersecurity posture
• Improving federal cybersecurity response capabilities
• Streamlining Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) reporting

Forward Networks is an approved vendor in all 8 functional capability categories. The data collected and analyzed by the Forward Networks platform is instrumental to ensuring that the network security posture matches expectations.

Knowledge-driven Security

Forward Enterprise helps agencies comply with CISA Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 23-1. Using Forward Enterprise, security professionals can identify vulnerabilities before becoming a threat. Because Forward Networks can scan your network multiple times per day without performance degradation, it delivers timely, actionable alerts to security professionals. In conjunction with third-party application integrations, the level of detail in alerts empowers engineers to remediate any errant configurations or known critical vulnerabilities before they cause an incident. The three most popular security use cases are:

• Attack surface management enables engineers to determine the blast radius of a compromised host in a single mouse click. This feature also works with the snapshot functionality to “go back in time” and document the blast radius on a specific date.
• Critical vulnerability management eliminates guesswork when responding to the thousands of CVEs issued each year. Forward Enterprise tracks the NIST known vulnerabilities and identifies which devices on the network are impacted using configuration, IOS, and features in use to present a prioritized remediation list. Integration with Rapid7 extends this capability to endpoints.
• Security posture management for agencies using microsegmentation in their pursuit of a zero trust architecture, Forward Enterprise provides a vendor-agnostic at-a-glance visualization of full, partial, or zero connectivity between zones.

To learn more about Forward Networks’ work with federal agencies, visit https://www.forwardnetworks.com/federal/.