Rear Adm. Nancy Norton has officially assumed the role of vice director at the Defense Information Systems Agency, following an initial announcement back in June.
[Changing command, a new vice director for DISA]
“I am really pleased to be here and honored to have a role in supporting [DISA Director Army Lt. Gen. Alan R. Lynn] in leading this organization. It is an honor to be selected to serve as the vice director and to work with this wonderful workforce,” Norton said in a statement.
Norton outlined three priorities she wishes to focus on in her new role: ensuring the lethality of the Department of Defense, building a joint network that is both maneuverable and mobile, and shaping an agile workforce that can adjust requirements and systems to meet changing war-fighter requirements.
In her previous role as director of warfare integration for information warfare and as deputy director for Navy cybersecurity, Norton pushed the Navy to take a cyber-resiliency approach as opposed to one of cyber protection, and to understand its cyber platforms as it understands other war-fighting platforms.
[For the Navy, its all about cyber resiliency, not cyber protection]
“How do we really think of cyber and what is the Navy’s cyber platform? So, we very much understand what a ship platform looks like, [be it] a submarine or an aircraft, what those platforms do and how we manage them, but we’ve not thought of the cyber platform in that same way as one of our war-fighting systems that we have to have an understanding of and how we control that,” she said in October.
“We [also] need to get the basics of cyber hygiene right,” Norton said in a statement recently released by DISA. “We still have an awful lot of work [to do] across the DOD, and well beyond that, in the federal and commercial sectors and across the board in industry [to keep our systems safe].”
Norton takes over for Air Force Maj. Gen. Sarah Zabel, who will now serve as director of information technology acquisition process development within the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition.
Also this month, Rear Adm. Kathleen Creighton took over as the deputy commander of the Joint Force Headquarters-Department of Defense Information Networks. JFHQ-DoDIN is the defensive operational arm of U.S. Cyber Command and is headed by Lynn, who is also the director of DISA.
[Hub for Cyber Command Defensive Ops Fully Operational by 2018]
[DoD cyber defense arm establishes intel/ops fusion cell]
Creighton previously served as the director of C4 for U.S. Pacific Command. She takes over from Maj. Gen. Robert Skinner.
Mark Pomerleau is a reporter for C4ISRNET, covering information warfare and cyberspace.
