By Beau Hutto
Mar 16, 2021
Nimble thinking affords organizations the ability to act and respond quickly amid evolving circumstances, and it’s key to both cloud adoption and capitalizing on cloud capabilities. Unfortunately, nimble thinking can be tough for federal agencies to integrate into operations that are subject to regulations and scrutiny.
Federal agencies have made progress on cloud adoption, but as top researchers over the past few years have pointed out, many are still struggling. It’s hard to blame them; despite overtures around acquisition reform and contracting agility, too often decision-makers remain saddled with decades-old processes that treat security hardware as the same kind of resource as a fighter jet. Cloud security like IT writ large requires a different mindset. It’s all about investing in the future of security and embracing the promise of nimble thinking that will pay dividends.
By Stephanie Kanowitz
Mar 16, 2021
The Defense Department is preparing for 5G-based telemedicine experiments with technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and robotic surgery.
DOD is expected to issue requests for prototype proposals from Joint Base San Antonio (JSBA) in Texas after releasing a statement of work for a 5G telemedicine and medical training project. The SOW sought industry input on development related to 5G-enabled AR/virtual reality-guided medical training, advanced telehealth information access, advanced robotic surgery and telementoring via AR for medical procedures.
The 5G network is critical to telemedicine because it shifts from the voice-centric 4G network to application-to-application communication without human intervention, National Spectrum Consortium (NSC) Vice Chairman Randy Clark said.
By GCN Staff
Mar 16, 2021
Cloud computing is helping reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emissions, potentially preventing more than 1 billion metric tons of CO2 from 2021 through 2024, according to a forecast from International Data Corp.
According to the market research firm, a key factor in the reduction of CO2 emissions has been the aggregation of discrete enterprise data centers to larger-scale facilities that can more efficiently manage power capacity, optimize cooling, leverage the most power-efficient servers and increase server utilization rates. The savings vary by region and country, IDC said, with the opportunities for greatest gains in areas currently using coal for power generation, like the Asia-Pacific region.
By GCN Staff
Mar 16, 2021
The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program has released supplemental requirements to ensure cloud service providers (CSPs) keep their container technology in compliance.
Released March 16, the document, Vulnerability Scanning Requirements for Containers, bridges the compliance gaps between traditional cloud and containerized systems by describing “the processes, architecture and security considerations specific to vulnerability scanning for cloud systems using container technology.”
Containers can be installed on bare metal or virtual machines, on-premise systems or within elastic cloud environments and are deployed and managed with various orchestration tools, the document states. According to FedRAMP, the technology introduces risk due to unvalidated external software, non-standard configurations, unmonitored container-to-container communication, ephemeral instances that are not tracked, unauthorized access and registry/repository poison
By Natalie Alms
Mar 17, 2021
The Department of Labor is using $9.6 million from recently expanded Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) to upgrade its enterprise data infrastructure.
The new project will improve the availability of the agency s data by boosting operational efficiency and public services so that federal agencies and other data consumers can access information more easily.
The Labor Department will use the funding to enable an evidence-based decision-making approach across enforcement, compliance unemployment insurance and other agency mission areas, the General Services Administration said in its announcement.
The proposed project will incorporate enterprise-standard predictive analytics and reporting capabilities into the department’s IT platform, implement enterprise data management and support an application programming interface and public-facing data portal to transform how the Labor Department shares data. “By the end of this project, DOL will unlock the