Collaboration between Agencies at the Federal, State and Local Levels
Collaboration between agencies at the federal, state, and local level is necessary as it helps individual agencies to get a more complete understanding of its systems and networks. Collaboration helps the agencies to come up with a framework for the better use of information that is relayed from external sharing partners (Johnson, Badger, & Waltermire, 2014) . Correlation of this data with information from the external sources can enhance the quality and quantity of data within an organization. It is through collaboration that the information is aggregated and analyzed from both the external and internal sources, which is helpful for the organization in building a richer context about the activities on its networks, while it can also detect blended threats better (Director of National Intelligence, 2017) . The aggregation of information from external sources is vital as it is an enrichment process that allows the transformation of ambiguous data into actionable information.
Collaboration and sharing of information among agencies across all levels of governance provide a means of increasing the effectiveness of the agency's cybersecurity capabilities (Johnson, Badger, & Waltermire, 2014) . The collaborative incident response is the only model that can help agencies to forge sharing partnerships that can allow for access to threat intelligence and tools that could not otherwise be available when working in isolation (Koepke, 2007) . It is also through these shared resources that the agencies can enhance their security network posture by leveraging on the knowledge, experience, and capabilities that the partners have.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
Collaboration can be encouraged by allowing one agency's detection to become the other's prevention tool, which is a powerful paradigm that increases the proclivity of responding to threats that go undetected. Moreover, collaboration involves the implementation of the incident coordination and information sharing capabilities. The activities of implementation of the incident coordination involve establishment, participation and maintaining the sharing relationships (Johnson, Badger, & Waltermire, 2014) . Establishment of the sharing relationships involves selecting information technology teams from every agency to work as representatives in the national teams. On the other hand, participation and maintaining relationships involves a coordinated activity, where the detection of one agency acts as a source of security for the other.
Recognition of the input of each agency is also a model that can help in maintaining coordinated relationships (Koepke, 2007) . Each agency must have a role to play in the collaboration, while the agencies must be consistently encouraged to leverage on information from the shared partners. Moreover, common training programs for the shared partners can help in collaboration as it helps in building teams that can respond to possible security threats.
Knowledge Failure Factors
The knowledge failure factor that is considered the biggest roadblock in collaboration is the poor infrastructure for nationwide decision making meant to transform information ownership to stewardship (Johnson, Badger, & Waltermire, 2014) . Collaboration has been hampered by the fact that agencies are not informed on how to transform ownership of information into stewardship. This implies that most of the agencies lack the knowledge of managing the data lifecycle, where collaboration with such agencies may increase the levels of adversaries posed to the information (Obama, 2013) . The lack of stewardship knowledge means that the data lifecycle is put at jeopardy in terms of the integrity and security, which deters major players from collaborating with novices.
The other knowledge failure factor that forms a roadblock in collaboration between agencies is the lack of technical know-how on relaying actionable, reliable and relevant information (Obama, 2013) . It is imperative that information incentives are divided between the sharing process and the quality of information that is shared. The relationship engendering a multidirectional flow of information is vital, where it creates a mutually beneficial relationship that discourages free-riding. Collaboration is thus hampered by lack of models for the multidirectional flow of information, where some collaboration partners lack the capability of providing actionable, reliable, and relevant information.
References
Department of National Intelligence. (2017). Annual Report to Congress. ISE Publication , 1-3. Retrieved from https://www.dni.gov/index.php/who-we-are/organizations/ise/about-the-ise
Johnson, C., Badger, L., & Waltermire, D. (2014). Guide to Cyber Threat Information Sharing (Draft). NIST Special Publication 800-150 (Draft) , 1-14. Retrieved from https://csrc.nist.gov/csrc/media/publications/sp/800-150/archive/2016-04-21/documents/sp800_150_draft.pdf
Koepke, P. (2007). Cybersecurity Information Sharing Incentives and Barriers. Working Paper CISL# 2017-13 , 1-17. Retrieved from http://web.mit.edu/smadnick/www/wp/2017-13.pdf
Obama, B. (2013). Executive Order: Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information. Executive Order , 1-15. Retrieved from https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/05/09/executive-order-making-open-and-machine-readable-new-default-government-
