Vijay D’Souza, director of information technology and cybersecurity at the Government Accountability Office (GAO), has said that agencies should establish a continuity of operations plan to prepare for uncontrollable disruptions, Federal News Network reported Thursday.

D’Souza told the publication in an interview that IT serves as the foundation of a continuity plan that supports other elements such as records management and human resources operations.

He noted that agencies should also consider using third-party cloud services as well as backup platforms. However, some IT functions such as equipment maintenance, patch installment and replacement work need to be done within agency facilities, D'Souza added.

“They basically need to start out by identifying the risks to their systems,” he said.  “I mentioned a natural disaster or it can be something like a pandemic ꟷ what you have to do is think about how each of those risks would affect each of the particular systems you have.”

D’Souza’s comments come after GAO recently released its Disaster Resilience Framework to help agencies ensure continuous operations.

Energy Systems Group has concluded a $42 million modernization project that sought to optimize energy efficiency at Hill Air Force Base under an Air Force Civil Engineer Center program.

The company built a 3.55-megawatt solar array and implemented seven energy conservation measure updates into 258 buildings in efforts to lower energy usage and reinforce warfighter reliability as part of the Energy Savings Performance Contract initiative, the U.S. Air Force said Thursday.

ESG renovated compressed and industrial air systems, modernized 60,000 light fixtures and incorporated dip tank covers on 24 tanks. The company also integrated the solar array to a 250-kilowatt fixed ground mount system to save 5.7M kilowatt-hours in energy consumption.

Mike Ringenberg, ESPC program manager at AFCEC, said the project will potentially yield 56 million kilowatt-hours annually in energy savings.

The Department of Energy will invest $20.1 million in 58 cost-shared technology development projects that tackle various topics in the areas of manufacturing, fuel and power. DOE said Thursday it will provide this financial support from the Technology Commercialization Fund managed by the department's Office of Technology Transitions.

TCF provides a total of over $33 million for cost-shared projects that will also receive over $36 million from the commercial sector. One of the projects aims to develop a simulation tool for alloy design activities. Another project will tackle the use of biographite in commercial lithium-ion batteries.

The department's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy approved funds for the 58 projects partnered with the following national laboratories:

• Ames Laboratory
• Argonne National Laboratory
• Brookhaven National Laboratory
• Idaho National Laboratory
• Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• National Energy Technology Laboratory
• National Renewable Energy Laboratory
• Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
• Sandia National Laboratories

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the general availability of its sixth generation of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances with three new instances powered by AWS-designed, Arm-based Graviton2 processors, the company reported on Thursday.

“The new Amazon EC2 instances powered by AWS-designed, Arm-based, Graviton2 processors represent a significant generational leap for customers, delivering 40% better price/performance over comparable x86-based instances, and already we’ve seen a broad set of customers embrace them across a wide variety of general purpose, compute optimized, and memory optimized workloads,” said David Brown, Vice President, Amazon EC2, at AWS.

The new general purpose (M6g), compute-optimized (C6g), and memory-optimized (R6g) instances will deliver up to 40 percent better price/performance over comparable current generation x86-based instances. The sixth generation Amazon EC2 will include M6g instances, designed for general-purpose workloads with balanced compute, memory and networking.

The C6g instances will support compute-intensive workloads, such as high performance computing, batch processing, video encoding, gaming, scientific modeling, distributed analytics, ad-serving and CPU-based machine learning inference, and R6g instances will  process large data sets in memory like open source databases, in-memory caches and real-time big data analytics.

Arm-based Amazon EC2 A1 has provided customers running scale-out workloads with significant cost savings as well as Arm support from an ecosystem of operating system and independent software vendors. The solution enhanced capabilities beyond those supported by A1 instances, such as faster processing, higher memory capacity, increased networking bandwidth, and larger instance sizes.

LexisNexis Risk Solutions is a global data and analytics company that provides data and technology services, analytics, predictive insights, and fraud prevention for a wide range of industries. “We tested our Java application based on OpenJDK8 on the Amazon EC2 M6g instances. This application handles a significant amount of encryption processes and is used to provide message level encryption to meet the security needs of our customers,” said Tim Miller, Senior Consulting Software Engineer for the Health Care segment of LexisNexis Risk Solutions.

About Amazon Web Services

For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform.

AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 76 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for nine more Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan, and Spain.

Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs.

The Red Cross telecommunications team has partnered with Avaya Holdings Corp. to enhance and simplify Red Cross communications to better leverage the benefits of mobility and cloud innovation to meet the demands of the COVID-19 pandemic, Avaya reported on Thursday. 

“We believe that this transition to a single contact center will help us improve experiences for those we serve, while increasing the productivity of our employees and boosting our overall organizational efficiency,” said DeWayne Bell, vice president, Information Technology Engineering, American Red Cross.

The Red Cross, as part of its One Contact Center initiative, will transform 12 separate contact center platforms with differing technologies to the Avaya OneCloud CCaaS cloud-based platform. Avaya will help the organization achieve its humanitarian mission and provide assistance to people and communities.

Avaya will handle inbound mobile calls to help people in need during a disaster, help individuals donate much needed blood and blood products, and handle donation services. The Red Cross has commenced this transition with the move of its critical toll-free number and several other mission critical inbound numbers over to Avaya Mobile Experience. 

The organization has projected that the transition will allow these mobile callers to get needed information and support faster with reduced wait times, and that contact center agents will be able to use additional call context to provide better service to mobile callers in current and future interactions.

“The American Red Cross mission is consistent with Avaya's focus of service and support to our customers and our global communities,” said Frank Ciccone, Senior Vice President, North America Sales, Avaya. “We are proud to help the Red Cross transform their contact center communications infrastructure and client experiences with a cloud-based solution that empowers their workers with the tools, support and capabilities they need to serve their communities.”

About Avaya

Businesses are built on the experiences they provide, and everyday millions of those experiences are built by Avaya (NYSE: AVYA). For over one hundred years, we’ve enabled organizations around the globe to win – by creating intelligent communications experiences for customers and employees. 

Avaya builds open, converged and innovative solutions to enhance and simplify communications and collaboration – in the cloud, on-premise or a hybrid of both. To grow your business, we’re committed to innovation, partnership, and a relentless focus on what’s next. We’re the technology company you trust to help you deliver Experiences that Matter