VA shakes up infosec ranks

The senior IT ranks at the Department of Veterans Affairs is getting refreshed after the exit of CIO LaVerne Council, a political appointee. Her temporary replacement Rob Thomas, formerly a senior deputy CIO, announced the moves in an email to staff in the early evening of Feb. 1.

Dominic Cussatt will become acting chief information security officer. He's helped lead the VA Enterprise Cybersecurity Strategy. Before joining VA, he served at the Department of Defense as a cybersecurity policy lead and held the post of deputy CISO.

Roopangi Kadakia, who was VA's CISO until the move, will shift to help lead the agency's ongoing cloud transformation as an expert in the Enterprise Program Management Office. In a previous role at NASA, Kadakia helped direct the move of 160 systems to the cloud. Thomas said she is, "uniquely qualified to lead cloud implementation and help [the Office of Information and Technology] modernize and drive improved outcomes."

"These leadership changes set OI&T up for success in modernizing our systems and eliminating our material weaknesses," Thomas said.

VA has longstanding information security issues, which past leadership had pledged to remediate. At a March 2016 hearing, an official from VA's Office of Inspector General testified that 57 of 69 information security recommendations made to the VA are still open, and of those, 17 were repeat recommendations and 13 were modified repeat recommendations.

FCW's emails to OI&T and the Office Inspector General about the status of the expected FY2016 information security report were not immediately answered.