With the passion of an evangelical, Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan preached the Defense Department’s (DoD) “uncompromising” approach to cybersecurity last month at the AFCEA West conference in San Diego. And, his sermon included spreading the responsibility for cybersecurity to industry as a condition of winning contracts. […]
About five years ago, many law enforcement officials wondered if the cloud was safe enough to hold their data. Now the FBI, the nation’s top law enforcement agency, is considering a move to a large-scale, commercial software cloud provider. […]
With compliance deadlines looming for Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), FedRAMP is ramping up its requirements for the monitoring of cloud systems. […]
The 2018 Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) deadlines for data center closures have been officially extended to 2020. That’s a good thing, as MeriTalk’s latest research found that fewer than one in five Federal data center leaders say their agency was on track to meet their DCOI goals for that 2018 deadline. MeriTalk’s “Data Center 2020” study looked at what’s still holding agencies back, and steps data center leaders are taking to get into a better position for success. […]
TalaTek, a risk management company, announced on Feb. 26 that it received a FedRAMP ATO from the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) for its Enterprise Compliance Management Solution (ECMS). This cloud-based SaaS allows PBGC to centralize security statistics in real time and see whether it complies with a variety of security frameworks, including NIST security frameworks. […]
Artificial intelligence has been applied to everything from cybersecurity and financial management to human resources and self-driving cars, so it seemed only a matter of time before it could take over video surveillance duties. And while AI, machine learning, and neural networks have made some promising strides in this area, it’s not quite the slam dunk that it might seem. […]
The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced a new Cyber-Digital Task Force on Tuesday. The group will examine both how DOJ currently combats cyber threats and ways it could improve its cyber threat response. […]
The Department of Defense’s (DoD) plan to accelerate adoption of commercial cloud computing saw an early result this month with the maximum $950 million contract worked out with REAN Cloud that lets DoD agencies buy cloud solutions and services directly from the company. The accelerated part of the equation resulted from the work of the Defense Unit Experimental (DIUx), which worked with REAN to enable prototyping and procurement of the full range of cloud requirements, contributing to the Other Transaction Authority (OTA) award. […]
Rather than focusing on technology, Compuware’s CEO Chris O’Malley believes Federal CIOs need to focus on people. A little strange coming from a tech CEO, but Chris seems to be on to something. Compuware is a reinvigorated 40-something mainframe software company based in Detroit in a tech space populated with young Californian cloud/agile upstarts–but O’Malley […]
Until now, most Federal agencies built their computing architectures like the aging buildings that house most of their headquarters, as huge monolithic structures that are inefficient, require frequent maintenance, and are wholly inflexible. Now, companies like Red Hat are offering a new path using microservices technology, which takes huge application stacks and breaks them down into tiny, modular components that can expand or contract based on needs, eliminating waste while ensuring critical services are always available regardless of future usage spikes. […]
Artificial intelligence is sexy–no doubt about it. From self-driving cars to personal assistant technology that can anticipate your every need, the future of AI looks promising. However, the actual technology can be confusing. And rarely does the reality of AI match up to expectations created by Hollywood portrayals. […]
Pentagon leaders say they’re serious about getting ahead in the artificial intelligence (AI) game, which increasingly could include the “games” involved in the modeling and simulation programs used for training. […]
The Trump administration has a fever for curing Fraud, Waste, and Abuse (FWA)–in fact, this is perhaps the most important Three Letter Acronym in Federal IT today. So, GAO’s January report on the shortcomings of CMS Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System (T-MSIS) and the fact that Medicaid improper payments hit an estimated $36.7 billion in 2017 raised temperatures across government. […]
The Air Force wants to take the idea of a virtual assistant to the next level, with a system that not only draws from existing information to answer questions, but puts some additional thought into helping airmen make better decisions. This is accomplished by quizzing them about what, precisely, they plan to do. […]
Creating some kind of an Internet of Things (IoT) beneath the ocean would be a daunting task, because the ocean tends to not cooperate. It’s vast, constantly in motion, and filled with water that’s not exactly friendly to communication as we know it. It can be tough to put hardware in place that’s up to the task of tracking activity in the waters around them. As a result, an adversary can often operate “under the radar,” so to speak, moving about underwater without detection. […]
The Trump Administration’s proposed $4.4 trillion budget for FY2019 would add some money to the cybersecurity pot, supporting ongoing programs and manpower levels, while cutting back on cybersecurity research and redistributing where the research money goes. Administration budget requests are largely political documents whose numbers won’t hold up once Congress gets done with making the sausage, but they do reflect White House priorities. […]
David Egts, chief technologist for Red Hat public sector has some words of wisdom for Federal managers seeking ways to move from legacy applications to more agile environments: modernization is not just about adopting new technologies and practices, it is about what happens to the old ones. […]
Sometime in May, the Army will take two armed, autonomous Humvees out onto a gunnery range to test and certify them as combat vehicles, which will make them the first robotic ground vehicles to be OK’d for combat. […]
The Trump Administration proposes spending nearly $45.8 billion on IT investments at major civilian agencies next year, a slight rise from the $45.6 billion in fiscal 2018, according to the 2019 budget proposal released Monday. […]
It is not uncommon today for agencies to use multiple cloud services such as Amazon Web Services for putting up computing resources on demand, Salesforce for customer relationship management applications, and either Google or Microsoft for email and collaboration tools. […]
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) want to modernize, but are being held back by a vestige of the 20th century–clunky, outdated technology platforms. […]
Agencies undergoing digital transformation are combining on-premise, hybrid, and multiple cloud solutions into their environments. To that end, agencies need to weave cloud security and protection of on-premise systems into their broader security strategy for a true, defense-in-depth approach. […]
The cloud is not a one-size fits all solution, and, as such, the government is looking to invest in two or three cloud models to support the differing security and risk-tolerance postures of agencies and to leverage various shared services, according to the President’s IT Modernization Report. […]
The Pentagon and White House are chewing over what to do about fitness tracking apps, in wake of the news last week that a global heat map posted online by Strava could be used to identify the whereabouts and activities of military personnel, including those in conflict zones and other sensitive areas such as the halls of the National Security Agency. A heat map transforms data into a map in which values are represented by colors, which in this case includes the location of fitness trackers carried by government employees. […]
As you open your fortune cookie–you might ask, will 2018 be the year of widespread deployment of Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) tools across Federal data centers? […]
As we barrel into Valentine’s Day, seems industry is falling in love again with NIST’s cyber framework makeover. Business groups and the tech sector reacted favorably to the latest update to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure, but noted more work needs to be done in several key areas. […]
Latest certification gives Cisco a hat trick in the secure government cloud. […]
MeriTalk has confirmed ringside rumors that Jeff Eisensmith is looking to hang up his gloves at DHS. After more than five years going toe-to-toe with America’s cyber adversaries, we’d like to wish America’s leading CISO the very best as he punches out. […]
The FBI fell far short of its own goals for fighting cybercrime in 2017, according to a Department of Justice (DOJ) audit. The FBI reported disrupting or dismantling 262 high-level criminal operations targeting global U.S. interests, only about half of its goal of 500, and roughly one-tenth of the 2,492 cybercrime operations it broke up in 2014. […]
The Department of Defense (DoD) would like to get rid of the Common Access Card (CAC), but the problem–finding a suitable replacement. It turns out that the replacement won’t be one thing, but multiple biometric identifiers that combine to make out a person’s identity. […]