For the Department of Homeland Security’s Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program to work, federal agencies need to ensure their data quality is top notch. Otherwise, their dashboards won’t offer an accurate picture of current assets and users on a federal agency’s network.

“Data quality can definitely cause issues,” said Hemant Baidwan, DHS deputy chief information security officer, at a FedInsider webinar discussing federal agencies’ progress on CDM implementation this week. “The dashboard is as good as what feeds it. If the data is not there and the quality and correlation are not there, whatever you’re seeing on the dashboard is not really actionable from a risk management standpoint. It makes it difficult to make decisions.”

The CDM program focuses on four key areas of cyber risk: asset management, identity management and credentialing, network security and data protection.

Baidwan encouraged federal agencies to focus on standardizing and normalizing their data before using the CDM dashboard to monitor their networks.

“The CDM program is a collaborative vehicle,”…