The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has earmarked $2.1 million to support two mobile security research and development projects led by private sector entities.

DHS said Monday that its Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) partnered with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) for the Secure and Resilient Mobile Network Infrastructure (SRMNI) program aimed at improving mobile network traffic visibility.

The initiative falls under the directorate’s Mobile Security and Emergency Communications R&D Program and seeks to address supply-chain security issues in the information and communications technology sector as well as 5G networks.

The program allocates $1.2 million for El Cerrito, California-based AppCensus to develop an application programming interface for traffic intelligence. 

GuidePoint Security, a cybersecurity company based in Herndon, Virginia, received $915,000 to develop an architecture that implements a Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) framework based on a Zscaler-built Security-as-a-Service tool called Internet Access Platform.

Matthew Hartman, deputy executive assistant director of cybersecurity at CISA, said the projects will help establish a TIC3.0-based overlay that will fortify federal mobile security networks.

William N. Bryan, acting undersecretary for S&T, said the two proposals will help improve the analysis of network traffic in enterprise environments. S&T previously selected seven industry-led R&D efforts for the SRMNI program.

The General Services Administration (GSA) is transferring oversight responsibilities for the “.gov” domain to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in a move that will take effect in April 2021.

CISA said Monday it will manage the top-level domain (TLD) which covers all branches of the federal government including states, counties, cities, tribes and territories. The move comes as part of efforts to comply with the DOTGOV Act of 2020 which directs oversight of the TLD to fall under CISA’s purview.

Eric Goldstein, executive assistant director for the cybersecurity division at CISA, said that using a .gov domain provides security benefits such as two-factor authentication and notifications on changes to DNS activity.

“We’ll endeavor to make the TLD more secure for the American public and harder for malicious actors to impersonate,” he said.

Lt. Col. Tim Trimailo, a materiel head at the Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC), said his office is working to develop recommendations on streamlining the Space Development Agency’s (SDA) contracting process, SpaceNews reported Monday.

Trimailo, who serves as materiel head for SMC’s Commercially Augmented Space Inter-networked Operations (CASINO) program, told attendees at a virtual Potomac Officers Club event that his team ran through proposals to help speed up the issuance of contracts and launch a constellation by 2022.

He noted that CASINO serves as the focal point for SMC’s activities in low-Earth orbit and has “a natural tie” to SDA’s initiatives. The CASINO team is actively looking into additional opportunities for collaboration with SDA, Trimailo noted.

CASINO is meant to support efforts under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Blackjack satellite communications program, according to SpaceNews.

“SDA is developing this stable of satellites that are going up very frequently, and there’s an opportunity to test some advanced capabilities on orbit to inform future investments and form the future architecture,” said Trimailo.

SDA is slated to operate under the U.S. Space Force by 2022.

If you missed the 2021 SDA Forum, you can still register to watch the OnDemand Version by visiting Potomac Officers Club’s Event Archive.

Akima announced on Monday that its subsidiary company Tuvli was appraised at maturity level 3 on the CMMI Institute’s Capability Maturity Model Integration Version 2.0 (CMMI V2.0) for information technology (IT) services.

“Helping our federal customers achieve success is our mission, and this rating demonstrates our commitment to delivering high-quality results,” commented Juvy McCarthy, president of Akima’s technology solutions and products group.

CMMI V2.0 is a multi-level improvement and appraisal program used to analyze companies’ internal processes and service quality. A CMMI appraisal aims to provide a company with the essential elements of effective techniques to improve performance over time.  There are five CMMI maturity levels, with the fifth as the most prestigious. They are in first to fifth order ‘initial’, ‘managed’, ‘defined’, ‘quantitatively managed’ and ‘optimizing.’

Tuvli’s appraisal at maturity level 3 or ‘defined’ demonstrated that its processes were well characterized and understood and are described in standards, procedures, tools, and methods. The ‘defined’ designation also illustrated that Tuvli’s standard processes are established and approved over time.

The appraisal was performed by Integrated Quality Corporation (IQ) and used its experience in IT infrastructure implementation to decide on the level 3 CMMI designation. “Obtaining this appraisal is a significant milestone for Tuvli. I am extremely proud of our team and their dedication to continuous improvement,” concluded McCarthy.

VMware announced new updates on Monday that will assist customers to modernize their applications and digital infrastructure. The updates are vSphere 7 and vSAN 7, and they will allow businesses’ information technology (IT) teams to support old and new applications with infrastructure that is developer and AI-ready. The updates will also increase data security and simplify business operations. 

“VMware is helping vSphere admins expand their influence beyond traditional virtualized applications to new enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) environments. These new capabilities allow infrastructure to meet the rapid pace of application change seamlessly,” said Lee Caswell, vice president of marketing at VMware.

The updates will reduce the cost and complexity of traditional storage and guide VMware’s 30,000 customers along the path to efficient and straightforward hybrid cloud use. vSphere 7 will address a set of customer issues, especially ones involving old software resource inefficiency. 

NVIDIA has exclusively certified VMware’s new updates, and they will be released for NVIDIA’s AI Enterprise suite, a cloud-native collection of optimized AI applications and frameworks, for an end-to-end AI solution. 

“NVIDIA AI Enterprise is a software suite optimized, certified and supported on VMware vSphere that enables customers to rapidly deploy, manage and scale AI in production with confidence,” said Justin Boitano, vice president and general manager of enterprise and edge computing at NVIDIA. 

The vSphere 7 update will support NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs in NVIDIA-Certified Systems. The NVIDIA AI Enterprise with vSphere 7 will enable customers to use end-to-end AI solutions with confidence on their existing enterprise virtualization platform, rather than running AI projects in separate unmanageable IT systems.

The updates will also deal with broad cybersecurity measures for applications, including confidential containers for vSphere Pods on AMD EPYC processor-based servers using secure encrypted virtualization-encrypted state (SEV-ES). The update also contains native key provider features, which will deliver primary key management server (KMS) capabilities permitting customers to enable encryption and advanced security features out of the box. 

“Through NVIDIA’s collaboration with VMware, IT professionals can now support business teams with the industry’s most trusted AI tools across their hybrid cloud infrastructure,” concluded Boitano. 

The White House announced that it will make a $250 million investment to promote COVID-19 vaccination and safety among racial and ethnic minority populations and other underserved populations and the Department of Health and Human Services will provide the funds in the form of health literacy grants. 

HHS said Monday that the office of minority health expects to fund about 43 projects in rural communities and 30 initiatives in urban communities for two years as part of the Advancing Health Literacy to Enhance Equitable Community Responses to COVID-19 program.

Under the program, localities will work with community-based organizations to promote health literacy among rural, minority and other vulnerable populations. Funding recipients will use local data to come up with a disparity impact assessment and a health literacy plan to connect underserved populations to vital health services during the pandemic.

Applications for the new initiative are due April 20th.