Sens. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said on Monday that an amendment they introduced last week to defense legislation that would ban government agencies from buying goods and services from China-based communications equipment makers ZTE and Huawei made the cut for inclusion into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY 2019. […]
Akamai today released an Attack Spotlight recounting how it mitigated the largest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in its history. Earlier this year, an Akamai client, an unnamed software company, was the target of a massive DDoS attack–one that broke the 1 terabyte per second threshold for the first time. […]
Can software-defined storage help support the data center modernization efforts of Federal agencies and help them meet ambitious Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) milestones? […]
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. […]
Federal agencies are facing a tall order in cleaning up their cybersecurity practices in the wake of some tough love dished out by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in a risk assessment and action plan released May 30. Agencies need to streamline processes, better share information, and finds ways of getting a better return on their cyber investments, all of which can be harder than it sounds. […]
Federal agencies and private sector firms are easing into intelligent automation (IA) technologies by first using those technologies to tackle repetitive processes and then moving closer to artificial intelligence (AI) applications, government and private sector officials said last week. […]
Legislative direction moving Federal agencies toward incremental development in their software initiatives is beginning to take hold, and Agile development methodologies have been a key driver of that success, according to an agency CIO, a leader in government IT modernization, and an industry executive assisting agencies in Agile adoption. […]
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. […]
Rod Turk, acting chief information officer at the Department of Commerce, said Thursday at MeriTalk’s 2018 Cloud Computing Brainstorm that the commodification of IT is changing the service delivery model to make shared services an inevitability, and agencies need to shift their thinking to adapt. Turk outlined his guiding principles for priming agencies for the shared services revolution and provided a set of process questions to aid in implementation. […]
Cloud computing technologies can help change how the Federal government handles its systems by providing an avenue to embrace IT modernization, said government executives on Thursday during a panel at MeriTalk’s 2018 Cloud Computing Brainstorm. […]
The Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) Board on Thursday announced the first three Federal agencies that will receive the initial round of funding authorized by the Modernizing Government Technology (MGT) Act. […]
Witnesses from the Federal government, academia, and the private sector zeroed in on cyber threats facing the U.S. electric grid at a House Energy subcommittee hearing Thursday afternoon. During the hearing–which largely centered around research and innovations in electric grid and energy technology–all of the witnesses stressed the importance of shoring up the U.S. electric […]
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. […]
House members on Thursday reintroduced a bipartisan bill that would prevent states from requiring technology companies to include encryption “backdoors” in their products that would allow governments to access data stored on those products. […]
Cloud computing can enable agencies to collect data from internet of things (IoT) devices and select the right tools for related tasks, IT industry leaders said Wednesday during a panel discussion at MeriTalk’s 2018 Cloud Computing Brainstorm. […]
A shift to the cloud offers government agencies an opportunity to embrace digital transformation, add automation, and rethink processes, said Federal IT panelists on Wednesday at MeriTalk’s 2018 Cloud Computing Brainstorm. […]
It’s no secret–Federal agencies are on the move to the cloud. We’ve seen the legislation and read the reports; the move to commercial cloud continues to march on. It’s a streamlined solution that offers cost savings, flexibility, innovation, and security. […]
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. […]
Kshemendra Paul, cloud action officer for the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) chief information officer, said Wednesday at MeriTalk’s 2018 Cloud Computing Brainstorm that while DHS has yet to establish the concrete business value of cloud migration, the financial benefits are just one piece of the puzzle in proving cloud’s worth to the agency. […]
The House Homeland Security Committee today approved H.R. 5733, the DHS [Department of Homeland Security] Industrial Control Systems Capabilities Enhancement Act of 2018, that would amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to give DHS’s National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) the responsibility to maintain capabilities to identify threats to industrial control systems (ICS). […]
Tony Scott was the Federal government’s third chief information officer, serving the nation in that role from 2015 through early 2017. During his time at the helm of government-wide IT, Scott led the development of 2016’s State of Federal IT Report, which left a lasting roadmap for modernization progress in the Federal government. […]
The digital transformation in government IT is driving modernization but also expanding the attack surface Federal agencies have to protect. The traditional perimeter no longer exists. Today, there is no “inside” or “outside” the network when it comes to detecting, defending, and deterring cyber attacks. […]
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. […]
Two research directors from IT advisory firm Gartner said today that sophisticated cyber attacks are likely to remain a permanent feature of the IT landscape because of their enduring ability to provide attackers with outsized monetary, social, and political payoffs. […]
The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) on Monday released its semiannual report to Congress, and outside of recurring calls for better cyber threat information sharing, improvements to identity access management, and concerns about U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) IT acquisitions, the report appears to be free of major IT red alerts within the agency. The report covers the period from October 2017 to March 2018. […]
The Federal government is making steady progress in adopting a key anti-phishing email security protocol, installing it on systems more quickly than organizations in other sectors, if a little behind a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deadline. […]
A report issued May 31 by the New America Foundation’s Cybersecurity Initiative recommends that the Federal government consider three “priority efforts” to help state governments advance their own efforts to improve cybersecurity, including “designating specific cybersecurity funding that is linked to national priorities.” […]
With the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) formally signing on last month to adopt the same electronic health records system as the Department of Defense (DoD), the two agencies are putting a lot of chips on a solution to a problem that history suggests is pretty risky. […]
We’re witnessing momentous developments in government technology. The Modernizing Government Technology (MGT) Act promises new incentives for agencies that can prove they’re maximizing government funds to bring about IT transformation. […]
Agencies need to leverage digital recruiting initiatives and enhanced data techniques to better attract talented and diverse personnel, according to human relations professionals at several Federal agencies speaking at a FedInsider webinar held May 31. […]