President Obama supports treating cyber infrastructure as a "Strategic Asset."  This comes as part of a much larger national protection strategy of which cyber makes up a small section. The plan covers everything from more secure development and better security solutions to plans to fight cyber espionage and cyber crime. The president plans to appoint a national cyber czar to report directly to him. 

Let's see how this plan develops over time, and the level of authority and budget that the new cyber czar will be given to implement real change. This has been a core problem in the past. There have been similar positions throughout the Bush administration with a lot turbulence and turnover.

• Howard Schmidt became the deputy to former cyber security czar Richard Clarke, then retired after 17 months
• He was followed by Amit Yoran who became the Director at the National Cyber Security Division, but left after about a year
• Donald "Andy" Purdy, a lawyer and beltway insider stepped into Mr. Yoran's role
• He was shortly replaced by Greg Garcia who was appointed to the Department of Homeland Security's assistant secretary for cyber security and telecommunications

Since then there have been about a half-dozen other players.

It will also be interesting to see if the person that takes on this new role will come from a real cyber security background. But even then, and with the right leadership, funding, authority, and resiliency of the office, can the government really help here? Can they be swift enough to make a difference or will this just manifest in more standards and regulations that because of red tape will be relevant only to security issues from circa 1999?