FITARA

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Government Reform and Operations announced the witness list for the FITARA 12.0 hearing on July 28. Federal CIO Clare Martorana headlines the list of four witnesses, according to a release today by the committee. […]

Cloud

Scaling out cloud connectivity during the COVID-19 pandemic has been a challenge for some Federal agencies, but continuing to do so will accelerate the government’s pace of IT modernization and its ability to better serve citizens, Federal officials said at a Feb. 2 event organized by ATARC. […]

SBA

Small Business Administration Deputy CIO Guy Cavallo said today that the agency’s extensive use of cloud-based IT has brought about what he called a “new miracle” of allowing the agency to tap a larger pool of workforce talent that is untethered from geographical limitations. […]

Small Business Administration (SBA) Deputy CIO Guy Cavallo assured members of the House Small Business Subcommittee on Investigations, Oversight, and Regulations today that cybersecurity at SBA is much stronger than metrics like those reflected in the FITARA scorecard may lead them to believe. […]

Both Small Business Administration (SBA) CTO Sanjay Gupta and Eddie Tejeda, Director of Cloud.Gov at the General Services Administration’s (GSA) Technology Transformation Services (TTS) organization,  agreed this week that a solid cloud foundation can enable future IT modernization or other technical transformation. […]

Bill Hunt, Chief Enterprise Architect at the Small Business Administration, detailed today some of the steps that SBA took to use the cloud for the Paycheck Protection Program established under the CARES Act in March to help fund payroll costs for small businesses hurt by the coronavirus pandemic. […]

When an April tweet about pandemic relief funding from President Trump jolted an 8,000 percent increase in traffic on the Small Business Administration website, the agency was ready to take the strain, having moved the site from on-prem to cloud a year earlier. […]

In a two-week period during the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, the Small Business Administration (SBA) processed more total loans than it had in 14 years, according to Melvin Brown II, director of the Enterprise Business Management Office within the agency’s CIO Office.  At the May 13 FCW Workshop on Data and Analytics, Brown shared the data management tips that helped the agency succeed. […]

The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), a loan program implemented by the Small Business Administration (SBA) designed to help small businesses keep workers on their payroll, will resume accepting applications from lenders today. […]

White House

How’s this for an emergency drill within the eye of the swirling coronavirus storm? As America social distanced, Federal IT has literally brought us together – as a government, and as a nation. As government IT operations achieve steady-state amid the demands of the pandemic, let’s begin to lift the veil on that story, starting with the Small Business Administration (SBA). […]

The Small Business Administration (SBA) transitioned to telework “without missing a beat,” quickly implemented new programs, and scaled to adjust to a mass number of new users amid the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic thanks to prior IT modernization and cloud transitions, per CIO Maria Roat. […]

The Small Business Administration (SBA) resolved 11 recommendations for improvement after the agency’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) determined that SBA’s information security procedures did not, overall, meet Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) reporting metrics, the OIG said. […]

Bipartisan legislation introduced in the House Jan. 24 would require the Small Business Administration (SBA) to establish a free cybersecurity marketplace for small businesses to purchase services from security vendors. […]

Census 2020 image-min

Small businesses are more likely to lack resources to build robust cybersecurity capabilities, but Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., are looking to address that challenge with their recently introduced Small Business Cybersecurity Assistance Act. […]

While opening a Senate Small Business Committee hearing on cybercrimes against small businesses today, committee Chairman Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., announced his rollout of two pieces of legislation which would aim to create greater accountability at the Small Business Administration (SBA) and to expand small business cybersecurity awareness and training resources. […]

DCOI data center server room infrastructure hyperconverged cloud storage architecture

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 Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Deputy CIO Guy Cavallo and CTO Sanjay Gupta said today at the FCW Cybersecurity Summit that their agency’s unorthodox approach to the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) Program is yielding a ton of practical benefits, even though it required a bit of a departure from CDM’s initial guidelines. Now, SBA is providing a new potential model for other agencies – many struggling with the first of CDM’s four phases – to use when considering how to achieve the outcomes the program intends. […]

The Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA), passed by Congress in December 2014, represented the first major legislative overhaul of Federal IT in nearly 20 years. Beginning in November 2015, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released two scorecards a year grading agencies’ performance under the law. Suffice to say, agencies haven’t always been making the GAO’s Honor Roll, with plenty of Cs and Ds to go around. However, many agencies have made significant improvements over the last 3 years. […]

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SBA

When Maria Roat became the chief information officer of the Small Business Administration, she had a few goals to accomplish in the first year: Get on Microsoft Office 16 and Windows 10, get to four racks on the agency’s data center, and move from copper to fiber. For a small government agency, these goals were ambitious. In Roat’s first month at SBA, a third of the agency’s network was saturated. Roat partnered with Microsoft to make these goals a reality. […]

cyber insurance

Despite the relatively new nature of cyber insurance policies, small businesses are finding value in their offerings, according to witnesses who testified before the House Small Business Committee on July 26. “It affords me the knowledge that if we were hacked, protective steps have been taken to address any potential damages to the company and my employees,”said Robert Luft, president of SureFire Innovations. […]

The Data Transparency Coalition is changing its name to Data Coalition and opening a new research center as it gathers steam to push to standardize and publish all government information as open data. […]

The Government Accountability Office, in a new report, said the Small Business Administration needs to do more to upgrade IT security. The SBA, which hands out billions in loan guarantees to small businesses, said it has fixed more than 30 recommendations. […]

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