Winter Program 2021

Friday, March 5, 2021
11:00 am - 12:30 pm

2021 Winter Educational Program Webinar

Thinking beyond the Center; How Infrastructure Interdependencies Can Ruin your Day

Planning and preparedness for a cyber resilient datacenter includes thinking outside of the box. From power redundancies to bird nests within your backup generators,there is a broad set of both physical and cyber considerations that impact the availability of your critical assets. It is important to understand the impacts of interdependencies to your design and how those interdependencies can introduce unintended consequences for data center environments, which have implications for the availability, integrity, and confidentiality of the crown jewel assets that data center owners are charged with protecting.

Topics Covered

Description of Data Center external dependencies to maintain availability.
Illustrate potential failure modes not considered during planning & design.
Design techniques to identify & mitigate critical interdependencies.

Speakers

Virginia “Ginger” Wright

Energy Cyber Portfolio Manager
National & Homeland Security
Idaho National Laboratory

Virginia “Ginger” Wright is the Energy Cybersecurity Portfolio Manager for Idaho National Laboratory’s Cybercore division within its National and Homeland Security directorate. She leads programs focused on cybersecurity and resilience of critical infrastructure for DOE, DARPA and other government agencies including DOE’s CyTRICS™ program. Ms. Wright’s recent research areas include incident response, critical infrastructure modeling and simulation, digital supply chain security, and nuclear cybersecurity.

Ms. Wright has a significant technical and program management background through her work at the laboratory, in government, education and private organizations. She focuses on designing and managing research projects to improve cyber security and cyber restoration of critical infrastructure systems, including the power grid and nuclear facilities. Ms. Wright is renowned for her ability to create collaborative, multidisciplinary environments for researchers. Her work on Cyber Informed Engineering and her research in component analysis for Critical Infrastructure digital assets are two recent impactful research efforts, gaining approval from DOE, vendors and asset owners.

Ms. Wright has held various positions at INL including Domestic Nuclear Cyber Security Program Manager, Conduct of Research Lead for INL Chief Research Officer, Deputy Director and Projects Manager for Mission Support Center, Principle Investigator for the INL team for DARPA National Cyber Range. Prior to joining INL, she was a Project Manager at the Central Intelligence Agency.

Ms. Wright has a Bachelor of Science in Information Systems/Operations Management from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Rob Beason

Manager, Cyber Resilience Department
Idaho National Laboratory

Rob Beason has a broad range of industry expertise in cybersecurity for IT and OT environments. Rob cut his teeth in the US Army as a member of the signal corps and has performed network security operations in a broad range of environments from small mobile data networks to enterprise class data center environments. Currently Rob is the manager of the Cyber Resilience department at Idaho National Laboratory whose mission is to build more cyber resilient systems which can endure adverse events with zero critical impacts to the safety and physical well-being of asset owners and those dependent upon those systems.

SKILLS

Primary: Cybersecurity leadership, teambuilding, cyber risk analysis
Secondary: Cybersecurity Architecture, systems design, network forensics, incident response, event coordination, good idea hobbit