Quick Hits
Will Roper, the former Air Force acquisition chief, has joined the board of directors of
Volansi, a company focused on autonomous, vertical take-off and landing middle-mile drone delivery services and holds a spot on the USAF s Skyborg program, and also joined the board of advisers at augmented reality firm
Red 6. According to a recent
Government Accountability Officereport, federal agencies continue to pursue data center consolidation goals without a clear, consistent metric for server utilization, a key data point for measuring accomplishments. Separately, the report notes that agencies are showing impressive progress on the consolidation policy, with $6.24 billion in reported savings or cost avoidance from 2012-2020 and the closure of hundreds of federal agency data centers.
By Stephen Kovac
As agencies modernize networks in the work-from-anywhere world, they must eliminate traditional on-premise castle and moat security models. Modern security approaches are needed to protect hybrid and multi-cloud architectures and modern networks.
We ve traditionally labelled network traffic as east to west or north to south. This is no longer relevant as more and more government users connect from devices outside the network perimeter. The network traffic compass used for the last 20 years is now broken.
To support this shift in managing and securing traffic in any direction, the TIC guidance provides the necessary flexibility for agencies to move from traditional remote work security solutions, such as virtual private networks, to a scalable network infrastructure that supports complex hybrid or multi-cloud environments.
By Natalie Alms
The Office of Personnel Management instructed agencies on the details of how to uproot Trump administration workforce policies, as ordered by President Joe Biden put in place via executive order days after taking office.
Much of the OPM s memo focuses on the series of 2018 executive orders that put restrictions on union activity at federal agencies and changed processes to make it easier to fire federal employees for poor performance.
The memo also instructs agencies to head back to the bargaining table on any provisions of collective bargaining agreements that they renegotiated with unions on the basis of those executive orders, which curtailed official time and put restrictions on union use of federal facilities.
Lawmakers in December tasked NIST with to developing processes that would ensure software vulnerability reports flow to the appropriate government offices and the issues are promptly fixed.