Jim Schifalacqua
Chief Information Security Officer, Peraton
Peraton Chief Information Security Officer Jim Schifalacqua successfully navigated two enormous cybersecurity challenges in 2020: supporting a remote workforce and avoiding a supply chain compromise.
With Peraton’s existing zero trust, cloud-first infrastructure, Peraton employees were immediately enabled to work from home. Schifalacqua layered additional guidelines and monitoring to address the added risks, and his team made rapid adjustments to Peraton’s endpoint threat and vulnerability management of these now always-off-network devices.
Even before the December 2020 SolarWinds incident, Schifalacqua focused on supply chain risk management by tightening up Peraton’s development environments and deploying DevSecOps controls and processes as a total risk management strategy for Peraton and its clients.
Peraton’s cloud-first approach to using Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program and high-assurance software-as-a-service for processing, secure storage, SD-WAN, IdAM, SIEM and advanced endpoint threat detection helped advance enterprise and federal missions with an agile and scalable platform. Peraton complied with NIST 800-171 and Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification and also successfully employed the MITRE ATT&CK framework for threat detection and response.
Why Watch
Schifalacqua’s main focus in 2021 is to combine three sets of businesses from Northrop Grumman IT and Mission Systems, Perspecta and Peraton after two acquisitions. This integration, company leaders said, will combine the best-of-breed cybersecurity teams, services and solutions into what will become one of the largest IT services providers to the federal government.