With the holiday season upon us, we at MeriTalk wanted to spread some holiday cheer. We’ve gathered up photos of our furry friends – and one with scales – dressed in festive attire, meeting Santa, or just enjoying some winter weather. […]
The Department of Defense (DoD) Prototypes and Experiments office is looking for submissions ahead of a solutions meeting that the office expects to hold in late spring 2021, according to a Dec. 22 release. […]
A bill introduced on Dec. 11 by Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and Rob Portman, R-Ohio, would require Federal agencies to report to Congress within seven days about any cyber attacks they have faced that would cause significant harm to national security or agency operations. […]
The Government Accountability Office (GAO)has reviewed several Department of Defense (DoD) information technology programs and found that the agency’s IT development approaches and cybersecurity practices may be impacting cost and scheduling. […]
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has outlined technical and policy options for creating database resources that can be used to identify chemical “fingerprints” and help investigators track down the sources of chemical weapon agents used in attacks. […]
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) this week issued its 2020 Presidential Transition Guide to Federal agencies, setting forth rules and policies for Federal agency and department heads to follow when dealing with the departure and appointment of political appointees and the treatment of career Federal employees during the transition to the incoming Biden administration. […]
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released a draft version of Special Publication (SP) 800-213 and several supporting documents aimed at manufacturers, with the goal of establishing a baseline for securely integrating Internet of Things (IoT) devices into Federal networks. […]
President Trump followed through today on threats to veto the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) Dec. 23. Both houses of Congress have already set up post-Christmas sessions to conduct votes aimed at overriding the presidential veto. […]
After congressional Democrats and Republicans broke a nine-month deadlock on Fiscal Year 2021 spending and further COVID-19 relief funding with their agreement on both fronts earlier this week, President Trump put the fate of the combined spending bill in doubt with suggestions to change the terms of payouts in the stimulus portion of the legislation. […]
The National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) and Project Management Institute (PMI) released a new report today on how to build a more agile Federal government, and provided five recommendations for how government can move in that direction. […]
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a draft version of guidance that will further help agencies report cloud-security data to the National Cybersecurity Protection System (NCPS), giving CISA the needed visibility to track network traffic amid increasing cloud migrations. […]
MeriTalk spoke with six key Federal IT suppliers about the Federal government’s mostly successful nine-month scramble to remote work and service delivery, with executives forecasting 2021 as a crucial opportunity to rework architectural, security and workforce concepts to turn the government IT’s year of turmoil in 2020 into lasting performance gains. […]
Key Federal IT suppliers agree that 2020 has been the year of making remote work and service delivery happen by any means necessary, and say that 2021 represents the opportunity for government to build better security and modern architecture into Federal networks as the remote-access experiment becomes the standard way of doing business and delivering services. […]
A long weekend of deals and a late night of voting turned a nine-month stalemate into a 5,593-page COVID relief and omnibus measure to fund the Federal government through September 2021. The House and Senate approved the legislation late on Dec. 21, and sent the bill to President Trump for his signature. […]
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Administration’s (CISA) Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program is due to receive a much-needed funding increase for Fiscal Year 2021, helping to address a shortfall for the program that aims to improve network security at Federal government civilian agencies. […]
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a draft version of a Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) Use Case focusing on access for remote users and user-owned mobile devices, setting the stage for more direct network access to agency and cloud-based resources. […]
On Dec. 15, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) flew with artificial intelligence (AI) as a working aircrew member on a military aircraft for the first time. The AI algorithm – known as ARTUµ – flew on a U-2 Dragon Lady with Maj. “Vudu” on a test flight that “was the result of years of concerted […]
Topline results in the 11th edition of the FITARA Scorecard issued today show more agencies declining than improving. But a deeper look into the scorecard shows that agencies are mostly holding steady, and that grading trends are mainly related to changes with how the House Oversight and Reform Committee scores agencies and their IT progress. […]
Most of the largest Federal agencies hung steady with their grading in the latest edition of the FITARA (Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act) Scorecard issued by the House Oversight and Reform Committee on Tuesday, although five agencies saw their grades decline versus only three agencies that notched higher scores. […]
Leaders of the House Government Operations Subcommittee cited heightened cybersecurity concerns today in endorsing the FITARA Scorecard as an enduring mechanism to measure performance of Federal agency IT initiatives and drive future improvements. […]
The House and Senate were poised late Monday to vote on a $1.4 trillion omnibus Federal spending bill, that includes $25 million of new funding for the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF). […]
Federal employees in the D.C. area that were scheduled to work on Inauguration Day (Jan. 20) will get the day off, according to a memo from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). […]
After months with no movement and a weekend full of deal-making, Congress is expected to pass a $900 billion COVID-19 relief package as part of a broader Fiscal Year 2021 (FY21) omnibus spending bill. The relief includes a new round of Payment Protection Program (PPP) funding, money for broadband deployment and emergency use, and money to remove banned Huawei and ZTE equipment. […]
The National Security Agency (NSA) late last week released new guidance on cloud security to defend against cyber threats that manipulate authentication environments. […]
A new survey released by MeriTalk and Splunk finds that public sector IT decision makers are increasingly planning around zero trust security concepts, with that thinking driven by current and future requirements for telework capabilities, among other security management needs. However, agencies face challenges in migrating to zero trust, including the need to invest in foundational technologies, according to findings from the survey of 150 Federal IT decision makers and 150 state, local, and higher education (SLED) IT decisionmakers on their agencies’ efforts around zero trust. […]
Malicious actors are targeting K-12 schools with a strong increase in ransomware attacks and other cyber threats, according to a Joint Cybersecurity Advisory released December 10 by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC). […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is well on its way towards its goal to move substantially to the cloud by 2024, with over 100 apps already migrated and expanded telehealth efforts leveraging cloud services, said James Gfrerer, VA CIO, during a MeriTalk webinar on Dec. 16. […]
The U.S. Air Force aims to modernize legacy systems built on COBOL and other legacy coding languages in the mid 1980’s to early 1990’s, with the intention of converting the code and moving the system into a cloud environment, according to a request for information (RFI) released by the service branch. […]
Senior House Republicans pointed today to the still-unfolding situation on Russian-backed hacking of government networks via SolarWinds software to call for passage of the Fiscal Year 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and the cybersecurity elements that the legislation features. […]
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a new report that four Federal agencies it examined are making progress on establishing data governance policies, but still have more work to do on some key milestones including assessing data and infrastructure maturity, and staff data literacy. […]