The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency doesn’t want to leave companies hanging when they reach out to CISA with an important innovation or technology development.

That’s a key reason why CISA earlier this month launched an Industry Engagement Platform, referred to as the IEP. The website provides an external portal where companies, nonprofits, academia and others can sign up to share information with the agency.

“We want deep engagement with the private sector technology innovators, and it can sometimes be hard to schedule meetings with the government or share what you’ve been working on,” Bob Costello, CISA’s chief information officer, said in a recent interview with Federal News Network.

Costello said CISA started work on the platform earlier this year with the goal of improving that process. He said the design of the IEP is based on widely used tax preparation services, with easily fillable fields and the ability to suggest meeting times with CISA staff across different divisions, depending on the topic.

“What we’re going to see first and foremost is hopefully shifting to the left or a shorter time period from when a vendor contacts us, to us expressing interest in the scheduling of that meeting, because we have the system handling all of that,” Costello said.

He said the new platform augments the more traditional ways CISA engages with outside organizations, such as requests for information or industry days. The goal is also to help smaller companies get in touch with the agency.

“I do see it as advancing our transparency and accessibility to working with us,” he said. “So much innovation happens in the private sector, as well as in research labs and elsewhere. But we really want to hear from all those innovators that maybe sometimes just don’t even know how to contact us.”

The new platform should also eventually give CISA a wealth of analytics on companies, technologies and sectors it engages with, Costello said. Tracking that engagement over time should also help the agency, he added.

“Maybe one group’s interested, or we see something here, but it’s not quite ready for an investment,” Costello explained. “Come back and talk to us in six months, and then we’re able to actually kind of track that progress in the system as well, too. I think that that’s very helpful overall to that business relationship that we have with industry.”

The cyber agency, which provides a range of cybersecurity and infrastructure services to government and industry, is interested in hearing about innovations in IT and security controls, data analytics, post-quantum security and artificial intelligence.

As the CIO, Costello said he’s particularly interested in automated testing solutions.

“There’s a lot of good work being done on automated testing of IT solutions. Automated or AI-based red teaming of systems is very interesting to us,” he said. “And not just vulnerability scanning, but helping to determine if your system or asset is actually vulnerable to the vulnerability that that’s being disclosed, or if you have other compensating controls in place that make it so that patching within 10 minutes is not really required … That’s the next generation of understanding how we do vulnerability management.”

Meanwhile, the engagement platform is a step toward eventually needing just one account to work with CISA, Costello said. Right now, the agency’s various cybersecurity services, for instance, all have different sign-up portals.

The agency also runs a voluntary cyber incident reporting portal. But under a rule scheduled to be finalized next May, thousands of companies across critical infrastructure sectors will be required to report cyber incidents to CISA, markedly increasing the number of reports the agency will receive.

“We are hoping to come in time where reporting to CISA or sharing information to CISA can happen across automated systems, while always maintaining that capability for a human to share information with us,” Costello said. “I’d really like us to start driving in [fiscal] 26. and we have a lot of really great ongoing initiatives, to get to that more automated sharing of large scale information.”

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