The Department of Defense’s (DoD) move to the cloud is fueled by the agency’s desire to improve interoperability and adopt emerging technologies, according to officials speaking during yesterday’s MeriTalk webinar. On the webinar, which was underwritten by AWS and Red Hat, Stephen Moon, senior solutions architect, DoD at Amazon Web Services, and Ted Brunell, chief architect, DoD at Red Hat discussed why cloud is mission-critical and how DoD sees it shaping the future. […]

The Defense Department is pushing full speed ahead on modernization efforts, with recent strides made on a $28 billion R&D project, a $10 billion cloud infrastructure proposed contract, efforts to move cyber defense infrastructure to the cloud, along with myriad advanced research and futuristic projects. They’re even working to overhaul their travel planning system. Call it AirDoD, perhaps? […]

The Department of Defense (DoD) has hired Michael Conlin as its first chief data officer (CDO). According to his LinkedIn profile, Conlin started in his new position in July. […]

The Department of Defense (DoD) has awarded to TekSynap, a small business based in Reston, Va., a $435 million contract for enterprise IT services and support for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). […]

Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan announced Thursday that the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx) will undergo a re-branding. The unit will drop “experimental” from its name and will be called Defense Innovation Unit, or DIU. […]

Vice President Pence said today that the Trump administration and the Defense Department are preparing to move forward with detailed plans to establish a new United States Space Command as a unified combatant command, and if Congress approves, as a separate branch of the military–dubbed the U.S. Space Force – equal to and separate from the existing five branches. […]

The U.S. Cyber Command (Cybercom) and the National Security Agency have joined the effort to protect the integrity of this year’s midterm elections, which are occurring under the shadow of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election and warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies that 2018 is seeing more of the same. […]

Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk. […]

The Department of Defense is getting on board with some critical website and email protections that have been mandated across civilian Federal government agencies, even if it is lagging somewhat behind other departments in applying encryption and anti-phishing measures. […]

Panelists at MeriTalk’s Cyber Security Brainstorm on Thursday will shed light on a host of vital cybersecurity issues, including threats to control systems, the foundational importance of security to IT modernization efforts, and the keys to success in risk-based security practices, according to a sneak peek into the thinking of just a few of the 25 experts scheduled to speak. […]

Booz Allen Hamilton has won an $885 million task order to provide artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning support to the U.S. Government Program Office, for use by the Defense Department (DoD), the company announced Monday. […]

Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk. […]

Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk. […]

The Defense Department (DoD) today issued its finalized request for proposals (RFP) for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud contract, formally opening the bidding process for a potential $10 billion enterprise cloud infrastructure. […]

As it looks to get new technologies developed and into the field as quickly as possible, the Department of Defense has been making greater use of Other Transaction Authority (OTA), a quick-strike contracting mechanism that has gone in and out of fashion since the 1950s, but is now seeing a resurgence. […]

The Defense Information Systems Agency’s (DISA) plan to move a key cybersecurity service to the cloud is in keeping with the push toward cloud computing for many of the Department of Defense’s operations, including those involving classified information. The question at the moment is whether the cloud services DISA wants to tap into are secure enough to handle the job. […]

The Department of Defense (DoD) on Tuesday released a justification and approval (J&A) document that says DoD is expanding the scope of the contract for its Electronic Health Record (EHR) system known as MHS Genesis. The document says that the contract must be expanded to achieve “a single standard baseline solution” with the new Department of Veterans Affairs EHR and also to incorporate the U.S. Coast Guard into the DoD EHR. […]

Congress, in its conference report for the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2019 released earlier this week, is demanding more transparency from the Pentagon regarding the agency’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract. […]

The Department of Defense is taking a more concerted approach to the development and use of artificial intelligence (AI) by bringing AI projects under one roof and emphasizing the importance of working with industry and academia. At the same time, DoD is also recognizing that it needs to give ethics a seat at the table. […]

After the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY 2019 cleared a major hurdle late yesterday with the release of a conference report that reconciles differences between House and Senate versions of the bills, techies across the Federal government are finding that IT modernization and innovation amendments for the Pentagon fared well in the legislation. […]

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY 2019 took a big step toward passage with the release of the conference report late yesterday that unifies House and Senate NDAA legislation and places in sharp focus concerns about growing cyber and electronic warfare threats and ways that the United States should address them. […]

A new Defense Department (DoD) Risk Management Framework (RMF) – due to be delivered to agency leaders in roughly seven weeks – will have strong implications for the way the department’s cybersecurity professionals perform their tasks, according to John Bergin, IT and Business System Reform Lead at DoD. […]

Department of Defense (DoD) Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy said today at the Defense Systems Summit that he has identified four “key strategic areas” that will work to support the National Defense Strategy (NDS). Those four areas – cloud, artificial intelligence, C3 (command, control, and communications), and cybersecurity – are organized not in order of importance, but rather “order of integration,” Deasy said, with each of the priorities flowing from the prior one. […]

Paul Craft, director of operations at the Joint Force Headquarters Department of Defense Information Network (JFHQ-DoDIN), spoke today at the Defense Systems Summit about how his relatively new component of U.S. Cyber Command is now tasked with operating and securing the entirety of DoD’s sprawling IT network infrastructure and has undertaken a complete restructuring of network operations for all of DoD. […]

Dana Deasy, chief information officer at the Department of Defense (DoD), said today at the Defense Systems Summit that he would not commit to an official release date for the finalized request for proposal (RFP) for DoD’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract. […]

Keeping pace with growing cyber threats is an uphill battle for Federal agencies as network complexity increases and the boundaries of networks extend to systems and devices not always under the control of their IT organizations. […]

The White House isn’t doing enough to address in a public forum a range of artificial intelligence issues and needs to institute a public process to seek comments on AI-related issues, said a group of six industry groups and more than 80 individuals from academia and the private sector in a July 4 letter to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). […]

To celebrate Independence Day, the Department of Defense (DoD) released its Digital Engineering Strategy on Wednesday. The strategy “promotes the use of digital representations of systems and components and the use of digital artifacts to design and sustain national defense systems,” DoD said. […]

The potential of artificial intelligence opens up the abundant future of game-changing machine-based applications in science, medicine, national defense, business, and just about every other area. But getting there while maintaining the U.S. lead in AI research and development will hinge on two old-school constants of innovation: money and people. […]

Amid growing fears of large-scale cyberattacks–ranging from attacks on infrastructure, to cyber espionage that threatens national security, to a “terabyte of death”–Congressional lawmakers are calling for a more clearly defined strategy for responding to such attacks. […]