The San Antonio Chamber of Commerce Cybersecurity and Military Affairs Councils held a joint meeting last week at Port San Antonio and received a briefing from NSA-Texas Cybersecurity Director Tahira Mammen on the NSA’s concerted efforts to increase external communication and become a more public facing entity.
To begin the meeting, Council Chairs Larry Hurtado, Executive Vice President and Managing Director, Qnext Corp USA, and Rick Crider, Executive Vice President, Airport/Railport & Military Relations, Port San Antonio, welcomed attendees and introduced Director Mammen. During her presentation, Director Mammen shared the importance of NSA leaning into being a collaborative hub and becoming a more public facing entity. To accomplish this, NSA has directed more traffic to their website, started social media accounts, and sent representatives to speak at various public conferences and events. Director Mammen was a featured speaker during a general session at the 2022 Alamo AFCEA ACE conference in November and shared with Council members that a number of relationships between industry and NSA stemmed from the conference.
In her presentation, Director Mammen touched on some of the mission related work NSA is focusing on, mainly targeting threats in the cloud. By 2023, the public cloud service market is expected to reach $623.3 Billion, and by 2025 data stored in the cloud will exceed 100 Zettabytes. With over 94% of enterprises already utilizing some sort of cloud service, adversaries in the cloud clearly represent an eminent threat. To close out the brief, Director Mammen highlighted the ongoing public-private partnerships operated by NSA through the NSA Cybersecurity Collaboration Center and hinted at possibilities for that to extend to NSA-Texas on a greater scale.
Following the brief, the Cybersecurity state advocacy focus team gave an update from the Chamber’s VIVA trip to Austin on February 28th. Re-capping the meetings the issue team had, they shared there is support and movement on all cybersecurity related issue items that were approved by the Council in 2022. Thank you to our Cybersecurity Issue team members for their outstanding work:
- Cindy McClister – PJR Corp
- Patsy Boozer – City of San Antonio
- Sophia Erian – Port San Antonio
- Victoria Washington – Vision IT
The Cybersecurity Council is now seeking additional members for the federal advocacy focus team during the Chamber’s annual SA to DC trip at the end of the month.
For more information on the Cybersecurity Council, contact Jeff Fair.