The Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program rolls agency risk up into a single number — the Agency-Wide Adaptive Risk Enumeration (AWARE) score. Leadership loves a number. The number, by itself, is nearly useless. The value is not the score; it is the ability to answer why the score is what it is, and what to do about it.
Root cause beats the dashboard
We built an Elastic-based CDM stack and used it to do exactly that — trace an AWARE score back to its contributing factors. A score spikes: is it a genuine increase in exposure, a flood of duplicate findings, a misconfigured feed, or a scanner that started double-counting? Root-cause analysis on the underlying data answers the question a dashboard only raises. Without it, agencies chase a number instead of fixing the thing that moves it.
The SIEM brand is not the point
We have done this work across Splunk, Elastic, and ArcSight. People treat those as tribes — and yes, the query languages differ, the licensing models differ, the operational quirks differ. But strip away the marketing and they do fundamentally the same thing: ingest data, normalize it, correlate it, let an analyst ask questions of it, and alert when something matters. The same creativity that finds the answer in one finds it in another. Give a skilled analyst the same data in any of the three and you get the same output.
Why that matters for federal teams
It means the discriminator was never the platform — it is whether the people running it understand data. An agency standardized on Elastic and an agency standardized on Splunk have the same fundamental problem to solve, and the skills transfer cleanly between them. We do not sell a platform religion; we bring the data engineering and analytic discipline that make any of them produce answers.
If your AWARE score is moving the wrong direction and no one can tell you why, that is a data problem we enjoy — and the SIEM you already own is almost certainly capable of answering it.
