Page 52 - Wolfram Alpha News Today

The Defense Department’s MilCloud 2.0 contract now gives Defense Information Services Agency and other non-combat DOD agencies access to cloud services from Amazon Web Services.

By Dennis Thankachan Feb 02, 2021 COVID-19 changed the face of the government workplace in 2020, with more employees and contractors working remotely than ever before. The “work from anywhere, anytime” trend, vastly accelerated by the pandemic and innovative, cloud-based digital workforce tools, offers unprecedented flexibility and benefits for agencies and workers alike. The question for IT and network managers is how to best support this and other vital, modern business and communication ...

By GCN Staff Feb 02, 2021 During a widespread emergency, many responder agencies are unable to exchange information between their computer-aided dispatch (CAD) systems, stifling situational awareness and introducing operational inefficiencies that can impair coordinated response. To address this challenge, the Integrated Justice Information Systems (IJIS) Institute will develop interoperability standards for CAD systems used by the nation’s public safety agencies. The CAD2CAD project -- funde...

By Peter Elkind, Jack Gillum, ProPublica Feb 02, 2021 This article was first posted on ProPublica. As America struggles to assess the damage from the devastating SolarWinds cyberattack discovered in December, ProPublica has learned of a promising defense that could shore up the vulnerability the hackers exploited: a system the federal government funded but has never required its vendors to use. The massive breach, which U.S. intelligence agencies say was “likely Russian in origin,” penetra...

By Stephanie Kanowitz Feb 02, 2021 Before the pandemic hit last year, there were no city employees in Berkeley, Calif., who teleworked. Almost overnight, about 700 needed to find ways to connect from home to city systems. The key to enabling that was an infrastructure modernization project that had recently wrapped up, said Berkeley’s IT Director Savita Chaudhary. Berkeley replaced an eight-year-old system with Nutanix’s hyperconverged platform. “We needed to have a strong infrastructure ...

By Justin Katz Feb 02, 2021 Einstein is the Department of Homeland Security’s intrusion detection system. It observes traffic flowing in and out of federal networks, allowing the government to target threats identified by a database of known malware. That makes it unlikely Einstein ever could have detected the malware implanted into SolarWinds Orion because it was delivered to agency networks through a trusted update. However, overhauling Einstein to identify unknown or zero-day threats would...

By GCN Staff Jan 29, 2021 The Army is looking for a system that can export sensor data from soldiers’ exoskeletons to their smartphones and to dashboards leaders can use to get a better idea of warfighters’ health and locations. Exoskeletons transfer much of the weight a soldier carries to the ground through battery-powered, titanium legs, allowing warfighters to carry extra gear with less effort, even when climbing stairs or steep terrain. Modern exoskeletons provide back and knee support,...

By Stephanie Kanowitz Jan 29, 2021 When the National Defense Authorization Act required the IRS procurement office to insert telecommunications security language into all its contracts, staff used a bot to accomplish in three days what would have taken a year. “As we looked at the number of contracts that had that criteria, it was 1,466 active contracts,” IRS Chief Procurement Officer Shanna Webbers said. “It would have taken us almost up to a year to modify all of those contracts.” Cal...

By Natalie Alms Jan 28, 2021 The General Services Administration is digging into hiring data to find out why agencies struggle to fill positions. According to GSA’s Hiring Assessment and Selection Outcome Dashboard, 90% of federal hiring decisions are based on an applicant’s resume and self-assessment, and only 53% of those candidates were offered a job.  Even when another type of assessment, like a multiple choice exam, is part of the review, the percentage ending in a job offer being mad...

By understanding their own traffic and how it is tied to their employees’ and end users’ needs, agencies can use TIC 3.0 to strengthen network security while improving the speed, efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the organization.