Members of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission have said that the government must collect more data to better evaluate the effectiveness of the Department of Defense’s “defend forward” strategy, Fifth Domain reported Tuesday.
Mark Montgomery, the commission’s executive director and former policy director at the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the group also recommended the establishment of a Bureau of Cyber Statistics that will enable visibility into the cyber ecosystem and provide sufficient information on the strategy's progress.
“I think business understands that the more data you have to analyze in the raw and make competent decisions against, the better off you’re going to be,” he said.
Chris Inglis, a fellow commissioner and former deputy director of the National Security Agency, said the strategy’s effectiveness may be measured based on the increase of allied nations that implement "defend forward".
He also suggested using data such as the decrease of high-profile cyberattacks over the next three to five years as performance metrics.
Montgomery and Inglis’ comments come after the CSC submitted their policy recommendations to Congress on March 11.