Feedback Requested on Trusted CI Five-Year Strategic Plan

NSF cyberinfrastructure is an engine of scientific research and innovation and underlies much of the science that Major Facilities enable. Key cyberinfrastructure components, including supercomputers, data repositories, sensor arrays, ships, software systems, and telescopes, are essential to scientific productivity, such that cybersecurity incidents can have a major impact on the scientific enterprise. For the cyberinfrastructure operators, implementing effective cybersecurity programs for these unique components is a complex challenge.

Trusted CI, the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (CCoE), has been working to overcome this challenge for over ten years. Its success has been noted both by the NSF community and the former director of the NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure. The 2021 JASON Report on Cybersecurity at Major Facilities indicated Trusted CI's demonstrable impact on improving the cybersecurity posture of many NSF Major Facilities.

In light of new and unprecedented challenges facing our community, Trusted CI is making a new strategic plan for the next five years, with a vision of secure operation of essential cyberinfrastructure enabling NSF’s vision of a nation that leads the world in scientific research and innovation. This plan will guide the creation of our renewal proposal.

We are seeking input on our strategic plan from key constituencies including our Advisory Committee and NSF Major Facilities representatives and welcome insights from the broader community as well. Please click the link below to view our five-year strategic plan covering 2024-2029 and provide feedback via email to kelshute@iu.edu. 

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8193607 

Thank you in advance for your thoughtful feedback and insights!

Broader Impacts Project Report

In early 2018 Trusted CI undertook an effort to develop and implement a strategy to help meet the cybersecurity needs of a broader set of NSF projects through awareness and outreach; i.e., to broaden the impact of Trusted CI.
The project involved analyzing our existing impact on the NSF community, applying our observations to Trusted CI’s 5-year vision for an NSF cybersecurity ecosystem, and identifying six strategies for broader impacts.

The full report is available online. Some highlights of the report are summarized below.

The analysis portion of the project helped to identify a few major accomplishments for the project thus far:

• Trusted CI has impacted over 190 NSF projects.
• Over 150 members of NSF projects attended our NSF Cybersecurity Summit. 
• Members of 70 NSF projects attended our webinars.
• Almost 100 of these NSF projects are funded at $1 million or more.
• 35 engagements have been conducted.
• Over 250 hours of training seminars have been presented or hosted.

The project concluded with 6 recommendations:

1. Fill in gaps in our collection of impact statistics (e.g., affiliation of training attendees).
2. Explore outreach opportunities to the Education and Human Resources (EHR) and Biological Sciences (BIO) Directorates, which are currently underrepresented in our impact metrics.
3. Increase attention on developing and maintaining the website, highlighting the content and services we are already providing. Our materials are only useful if our stakeholders can discover them. It’s helpful to consider different stakeholder perspectives when updating and reorganizing the website.
4. Trusted CI should provide more materials addressing availability and integrity concerns from the community, leveraging external expertise.
5. Trusted CI should document and share its experiences and expertise related to operating a community-focused center of excellence, to benefit other similar organizations.
6. When implementing our 2019‐2023 vision, Trusted CI should emphasize outreach as an essential component of each strategic objective.

Our role in the NSF community is stable and growing. Trusted CI’s next five years present an exciting challenge to take what we have learned thus far and continue to support the cybersecurity needs of NSF projects.

Trusted CI 5-year Vision and Strategy

The Trusted CI team is pleased to announce the publication of “The Trusted CI Vision for an NSF Cybersecurity Ecosystem”.  From the introduction:

This document establishes Trusted CI’s vision for a NSF Cybersecurity Ecosystem – a collection of people, knowledge, processes, and cyberinfrastructure – that is necessary to support cybersecurity across the diverse NSF community. Trusted CI is primarily responsible for bringing the vision of a NSF Cybersecurity Ecosystem to fruition. Hence, following Trusted CI’s vision is its mission statement and five-year strategic plan to fulfill that role.

This living document will guide our activities going forward and we welcome community feedback as to its content. As implied in the above paragraph, the vision is broader than any one project can accomplish and we will collaborate with others in the community to achieve this vision.

A full citation for the Vision document follows.  We’ll update the document with subsequent versions as required to keep abreast of progress, suggestions, and changes.

V. Welch, J. Basney, C. Jackson, J. Marsteller, and B. Miller, “The Trusted CI Vision for an NSF Cybersecurity Ecosystem And Five-year Strategic Plan (2019-2023),” Trusted CI, Apr. 2018 [Online]. Available: http://hdl.handle.net/2022/22178.