Fast, reliable, and secure communications is essential to success in the battlespace. The advent of the telegraph was a central part of Civil War strategy and tactics. Introduction of the radio was just as important in World War I, while radar and sonar – other forms of conveying crucial information – played an important role in World War II. Using 5G to facilitate communications in today’s combat settings is just as signific...

Executives in the healthcare industry know they have a problem protecting the identity information of all the moving parts in the U.S. health system – a problem driven home by the $65 million settlement a Pennsylvania provider will pay after it refused to pay more than $5 million to end a ransomware attack, In response, the hackers posted nude photos of patients taken as they underwent treatment. The FBI’s 2023 Internet Crime Repor...

Every year the Partnership for Public Service identifies the best places to work in the federal government, based on a survey of employees. This is why agencies should consider building their employer brand, as a necessary component of recruiting talented new people. Many corporations utilize such a strategy to give themselves a competitive advantage, by emphasizing their values and culture, providing opportunities for career advancement, and...

Managing identities and access across Microsoft Entra ID, Google Cloud, and AWS is a growing challenge for government agencies at all levels. Distributing agencies’ application infrastructure and workloads among different clouds has benefits, such as greater resilience, targeted cost management, and greater flexibility in the future by avoiding lock-in with one provider. But the benefits carry their own drawbacks, including the need to m...

The goal of digital transformation is to streamline agency operations while increasing customer satisfaction. Achieving that goal requires planning up front, however – if there isn’t a clear objective it is easy to get off track, and cutting corners on execution to make up time can be tempting. For instance, the third-party contractors often used by agencies want to set themselves up for success, so they should receive guidance on...

Migrating to the cloud is not simple, especially if an agency wants to establish a multi-cloud environment that can support a growing number of apps and a wide range of services. Migration requires eliminating IT silos, a unified management and control system, automation of tasks, being able to extend and migrate apps and data in all the clouds in use, and more. Solutions have emerged that aim to simplify administration, improve resilience, an...

Zero Trust (ZT) is a cybersecurity framework that automates an organization’s security architecture and orchestrates a response as soon as systems are attacked. This is why ZT is the core of “Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity,” the Executive Order issued in May 2021 requiring agencies to implement a zero trust architecture for their IT systems. The challenge, however, lies in implementing a complete solution guided b...

As the upcoming elections approach, the integrity of our electoral systems is under greater scrutiny than ever before. Election security professionals are on the front lines, tasked with the critical mission of safeguarding the technology that underpins our democracy. But trust in elections continues to decline. Election officials all around the country are taking extraordinary steps to reassure the public that election results are secure and...

The federal government has been implementing variations on a cloud strategy since at least 2011, when President Obama introduced a call for “cloud-first” solutions. Since then, cloud has become something of a de facto standard for agencies looking to transform their IT operations, thanks to the General Services Administration’s Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP). FedRAMP’s three primary goals ar...

Executive Order 14028 mandates agencies implement zero trust (ZT) architectures for all cyber networks. Zero trust relies on a full understanding of the cyber attack surface in order to move the boundary closer to the user and secure each component. After all, you can’t secure what you don’t know you have. Many agencies are still struggling to answer simple questions: What devices have access to our environments? Is the core softwa...