The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a draft of its Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) policy late Friday, with the goals of removing barriers to cloud and modern technology adoption, ensuring that the TIC initiative remains agile, and streamlining and automating verification processes. […]
Tags
Cloud
Thomas Michelli, acting deputy CIO for cybersecurity at the Defense Department, said late Tuesday that one idea being discussed at the Pentagon to improve supply chain security involves providing a “government furnished cloud” for contractors to use. […]
The Small Business Administration (SBA) is working with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to run a pilot program to fulfill Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) requirements in the cloud with an innovative approach to meet CDM’s goals. […]
The General Services Administration (GSA) released a request for information detailing part of the Federal Acquisition Service’s (FAS’) new CIO Modernization and Enterprise Transformation contract–named COMET for short–and highlighted the guiding principles of cloud-native solutions, SecDevOps, and data management. […]
The State Department is standing up a cloud program office and taking the opportunity to modernize both systems across the department, according to Brian Merrick, deputy director of cloud program management at the State Department. […]
When the term “ubiquitous computing” was first coined in the late 1980s, it was envisioned as a sea of electronic devices “connected by wires, radio waves, and infrared,” that are so widely used, nobody notices their presence. By that definition, the era of ubiquitous computing arrived some time ago. Everything from movie theater projectors to […]
Current and retired Defense Department IT officials today discussed cost and opportunity implications of further cloud adoption by the military and potential payoffs including acceleration of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. […]
Sanjay Gupta, chief technology officer at the Small Business Administration (SBA), discussed last week how his agency has aggressively moved to the cloud while keeping security at the forefront with new pilots to meet Federal requirements. […]
Current and former Department of Defense (DoD) officials discussed the benefits of using cloud and modernizing their legacy equipment to help accomplish their mission. […]
The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are collecting industry feedback to create a “catalog of standardized metrics” for Federal commercial cloud service level agreements, according to a DISA request for information. The RFI notes that “an inter-agency working group is developing a catalog of metrics that […]
A former top White House cybersecurity policymaker and IT systems manager at the Department of Education said today at the FCW Cybersecurity Summit that Federal agencies should expect to become targets of sophisticated cyber attacks and should count on assistance from other entities including their cloud service providers to meet those assaults. […]
Security in the cloud is a shared responsibility between cloud service providers (CSPs) and government organizations. CSPs provide agencies with a secure platform to operate on, but it is the responsibility of agency security leaders to ensure the applications that are being hosted have been hardened, according to security experts. […]
Federal agencies are not often known as cradles of innovation, but the adoption of the cloud has helped usher in a new era of government–one that improves transparency, cost efficiency and public engagement. […]
An overwhelming majority–86 percent–of 150 Defense Department (DoD) IT managers surveyed by MeriTalk said that failing to modernize legacy DoD systems is putting U.S. national security in jeopardy, and a similar number (83 percent) are concerned about the potential of the U.S. falling behind adversaries like China and Russia in newer-technology arenas including cyberspace, artificial intelligence, and electronic warfare. […]
Is moving to the cloud too risky for government agencies’ sensitive data? Is the cloud too expensive? Will migrating hinder government performance? There’s a lot of misleading and confusing information out there when it comes to commercial cloud adoption in government, so MeriTalk and Amazon Web Services decided to clear the cloud clutter and demystify government cloud adoption once and for all with their latest research – “Fact or Fiction? Debunking Government Cloud Myths.” […]
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. […]
As debate swirls around the Department of Defense’s (DoD) multibillion dollar Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud acquisition, the department’s push toward commercial cloud services is continuing on other fronts. […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is focused on modernizing its aging technology infrastructure. From overhauling its electronic health records system to moving to the cloud, the VA has been busy. […]
Action plans to accelerate Federal agency migrations to cloud platforms and services as outlined in the White House IT Modernization Report have been in effect for nearly three months now. For instance, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) was directed to conduct a data call within 30 days of the report’s release, requesting agencies to identify systems that might be ready for cloud migration, but have not because of some perceived or encountered difficulties. […]
The Army recently added 18 more vendors to its $250 million Army Cloud Computing Enterprise Transformation (ACCENT) contract, which kicked off last year with 50 vendors certified as meeting the Army’s requirements for cloud services. […]
Most Federal managers grasp the concept of automation, the use of technology to perform a process or procedure without human assistance. However, do they really understand the role of automation, and how it can be applied to accelerate delivery and management of IT resources and applications, especially in this era of multi-clouds? […]
While Federal agencies race to migrate to the cloud, security concerns seem to multiply by the hour. This month alone, Russian hackers penetrated the U.S. power grid; cyber attackers got into the network of a petrochemical company in Saudi Arabia in hopes of triggering an explosion; and North Korean hackers apparently “blitzed” Turkish banks and government organizations to gather intel for a future heist. […]
Government IT leaders may feel a little punch drunk lately. Between new mandates, an understaffed workforce, and aging systems–they are getting hit from all angles. Indeed, Chad Sheridan, CIO for USDA’s Risk Management Agency kicked off his keynote at last Thursday’s Veritas Public Sector Vision Day in Washington, D.C. by quoting Mike Tyson: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” […]
Even with the Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) deadlines pushed out to 2020, Federal agencies face significant pressure to expedite cloud migrations and consolidate their compute environments in a secure and cost-effective manner. Now, with the passage of the Modernizing Government Technology (MGT) Act, agencies may need to demonstrate significant progress in this area to justify their MGT Act budget requests. […]
If you’re looking for reference material on domestic sludge, gold nanoparticles, or peanut butter, a move by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to modernize its e-commerce portal should make it easier to get the information you’re seeking. […]
Since 2001, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has tried three different modernization programs for its healthcare system. So when the department announced another plan to modernize by adopting the same system as the Department of Defense (DoD), the Subcommittee on Information Technology was skeptical and interrogated them in a Dec.7 hearing. […]
With rapid growth in smart devices, exploding data volumes, and the shift to the cloud, it is becoming more and more challenging to protect critical systems and information. Government and industry leaders convened at the Symantec Government Symposium in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday to discuss these complex challenges and the solutions needed to address them. […]
Kevin Cox is Jon Snow in the war against cyber threats–for the cyber night is here and full of terrors. And, winter isn’t coming–it’s already here. As Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) rounds out phases I and II, our government needs automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to hold back the ugly cyber hoards. AI, ML, and cloud are the dragons, dragon glass, and Valyrian steel that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) needs to combat the hacking white walkers. Okay, so how to separate fact from fairytale? […]
After years of fits and starts on a much-needed electronic filing system, the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) is “poised” to deploy a comprehensive, cloud-based e-file platform next year to help reduce a massive backlog of cases, a top EOIR official said recently. […]
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson spoke frankly about the need IT modernization in the State Department last week, both referencing his personal experiences with the department’s servers and tying it into a larger need for reorganization in the department, but failing to lay out any concrete plan for the changes. […]