Practice Areas

Via Stella provides senior advisory services to organizations operating at the intersection of cybersecurity and critical infrastructure — the nexus where the most consequential risk decisions actually get made, and where neither pure cyber expertise nor pure infrastructure expertise is sufficient on its own.

Bridget Bean previously served as Executive Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the federal lead for civilian cybersecurity and the security and resilience of the nation’s 16 critical infrastructure sectors. That vantage point — sitting where the technical, the operational, the legal, and the political converge — informs every engagement.

The practice helps federal agencies, sector risk management agencies, state and local partners, and the operators of critical infrastructure understand and manage cyber and infrastructure risk in mission-critical environments. Services may include cyber and critical infrastructure risk advisory, sector resilience planning, executive threat briefings, interagency and stakeholder engagement strategies, operational readiness and crisis preparedness support, and guidance on aligning cyber and infrastructure protection priorities with mission and policy needs.

Via Stella is built for clients who need senior-level judgment, not deliverables — a clear recommendation, a defensible decision memo, or a candid conversation grounded in primary-source policy and direct operational experience at the top of the federal civilian cyber and CI enterprise.

Federal agencies face a converging set of threats to America's food and agricultural systems: state-directed acquisition of farmland and biotech, the smuggling of dangerous pathogens, vulnerabilities exposed by uncontrolled foreign-made drones, and the erosion of the counterintelligence capability built to detect exactly these kinds of incidents. The legal and policy framework — from HSPD-9 and PPD-21 through NSM-16, NSM-22, CFIUS, AFIDA, and the FY 2025 NDAA — is dense, fragmented across departments, and moving faster than most programs can keep up with.

Via Stella provides senior-level advisory support to federal departments and agencies working at the intersection of homeland security, agriculture, public health, and national defense. Engagements draw on 30 years of direct experience with the interagency process and the operational realities behind the headlines, helping clients turn threat awareness into defensible policy, programs, and budget.

Strategic Advisory and Policy Analysis. Via Stella partners with Federal, state, local and industry to assess emerging threats, stress-test existing authorities, design new programs, and develop policy options that survive contact with Congress, OMB, and the field. Typical engagements include biosecurity and agroterrorism risk assessment, foreign-influence and research-security program design, critical-infrastructure sector strategy, and review of proposed rules, directives, and legislative language for operational feasibility.

Critical Infrastructure Risk and Protection. The Food and Agriculture Sector is uniquely exposed — geographically dispersed, deeply dependent on private-sector operators, and intertwined with the Water, Transportation, Healthcare, and Energy sectors in ways that magnify any single point of failure. Via Stella supports federal sector-specific agencies and their partners with threat and vulnerability assessments at the asset, sub-sector, and supply-chain level; protective-program design aligned to NSM-16 and NSM-22; coordination with the Food and Agriculture Sector Coordinating Council and Government Coordinating Council; insider-threat and foreign-influence mitigation; drone and cyber-physical threat analysis; and crisis-response and continuity planning for high-consequence biological, chemical, and intentional contamination events.

Mission-critical organizations are judged not by how well they operate on a good day but by how quickly they recover from a bad one. The federal continuity, resilience, and emergency management framework — from National Continuity Policy and FCD-1 through Stafford Act authorities, the National Response Framework, the National Disaster Recovery Framework, and sector-specific resilience requirements — is built for moments when the ordinary chain of command, communications, and supply assumptions all fail at once.

Via Stella supports federal agencies and critical infrastructure operators in designing, exercising, and improving the programs that have to work when those moments arrive: continuity of operations and continuity of government planning, all-hazards emergency management program design, crisis decision support and senior-leader exercise design, after-action review and lessons-learned implementation, and resilience strategy that accounts for compounding cyber, physical, and supply-chain disruption.

The hardest problem in federal mission-critical work is not strategy — it is converting strategy into programs that actually run. Via Stella advises senior leaders on modernizing legacy programs and standing up new ones so they survive the realities of the federal operating environment: authorities, appropriations, acquisition timelines, workforce constraints, and the political cycle.

Engagements include organizational design and stand-up support for new offices and missions, program reviews and turnaround support for programs that have lost momentum or political cover, governance and operating model design for cross-component and interagency missions, performance management and metrics that hold up to OIG and GAO scrutiny, and executive coaching for senior leaders newly accountable for high-visibility programs.