Naval Information Warfare (NAVWAR) Systems Command has tested a technology made to equip the USS Gabrielle Giffords littoral combat ship with bolstered cybersecurity and backup connectivity. The Commercial Cellular as a Transport (CCaaT) test aims to demonstrate the ship's cyber readiness outside the continental U.S., the U.S. Navy said Wednesday.

CCaaT provides the Independence-variant ship connectivity via 4G LTE technology to establish an alternative connection in the event of satellite communications failure. The technology also allows technical personnel to remotely address issues amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The initial results from OCONUS testing are positive in showing how we can leverage commercial technology to get the fleet important cyber software updates quicker and more reliably,” said Nick Freije, technical director of NAVWAR's Fleet Readiness Directorate (FRD). 

NAVWAR FRD is working with Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) Pacific to further implement CCaaT technology across piers where a higher bandwidth still isn't available.

Jose Arrieta, chief information officer of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said the use of commercial-off-the-shelf technologies resulted in a more flexible approach to gathering data on the COVID-19 pandemic, FedScoop reported Wednesday.

Arrieta told attendees during a recent webinar that the department’s HHS Protect data analytics tool was able to establish fortified identity, credential and access management (ICAM) defenses while securing the transmission of data.

He noted that foreign adversaries can easily exploit ICAM layers and render existing government security protocols obsolete. The ICAM capability can help agencies other than HHS fortify their network defenses amid the ongoing health crisis, according to Arrieta.

“The way that you actually deliver and the way that you actually contract for a business outcome related to digitizing a process is totally different than it was a few years ago, maybe even a few months ago,” he said. “I think the pandemic has changed that.”

HHS Protect was launched in April 2020 and has collected over 200 health data sets across 6,146 hospitals and 80 percent of private labs to date, the report states.

Salesforce has launched ‘Salesforce Anywhere’ to provide enhanced technologies and platform services to help organizations retrieve greater levels of productivity and customer success during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, the company announced on Thursday.

“The COVID-19 crisis has taught us that companies must be able to sell, service, market and collaborate from anywhere, and that won’t change in a post-pandemic world,” said Bret Taylor, president and COO Salesforce.

Salesforce reported that nearly 70 percent of people believe the pandemic will permanently change the nature of work and more than 50 percent say that flexible work locations are very important to them. The company’s solution will enable an all-digital, work-from-anywhere business model.

Salesforce Anywhere will enable organizations to sell, service and market from anywhere. The platform will be powered by Salesforce Customer 360 and include new industry-specific technology. The platform will also promote collaboration from anywhere by embedding chat, alerts, comments and video directly into the Salesforce service offerings.

The company will enable the workforce to work from any location by integrating an employee service solution and new employee data model that will allow organizations to build, manage and scale employee apps and services quickly and securely.

Salesforce has also integrated MuleSoft and Einstein Recommendations to provide data and build employees’ skill set. With the addition, users will be able to understand data and unlock insights to make better decisions as well as drive their company’s digital transformation.

Users can subscribe to real-time alerts for any changes and updates made within Salesforce. Customers may also gain access to instant message or video, while looking at the same page together within Salesforce.

Salesforce will offer a new native real-time chat and video experience powered by Amazon Chime. Zoom will also be offered as an out-of-the-box integration so that organizations can leverage their video conference of choice. Teammates will be able to work on the same Salesforce page and follow teammates to other parts of Salesforce, so teams can work side-by-side.

“With Salesforce Anywhere we’re empowering customers of every size, location and industry to digitally transform with confidence in this all-digital, work-from-anywhere world,” added Taylor.

About Salesforce

Salesforce is the global leader in Customer Relationship Management (CRM), bringing companies closer to their customers in the digital age. Founded in 1999, Salesforce enables companies of every size and industry to take advantage of powerful technologies—cloud, mobile, social, internet of things, artificial intelligence, voice and blockchain—to create a 360-degree view of their customers.

Karen St. Germain, director of NASA’s Earth Science division, said her top priority will be finding ways to implement the Earth science decadal survey, SpaceNews reported Wednesday.

“The decadal survey is a pretty ambitious plan that also calls on us to deliver on the program of record from the prior decadal,” St. Germain said Tuesday at an online meeting of NASA’s Earth Science Technology Forum. “We’ve got a fairly encumbered Earth science budget for the next several years, so one challenge will be starting up the new decadal missions within the resources that we have.”

She explained that technology improvements, rising commercial Earth observation capabilities and increasing demand for actionable information to study environmental conditions like climate change are some of the factors that pose challenges in executing the recommendations from the decadal survey.

St. Germain, who joined the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in early June 2020, said she would use her experience at NOAA to help improve collaboration with NASA in the field of Earth observation.

NASA’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2021 requested $1.77 billion for the Earth science division, which secured $1.97 billion in FY 2020 appropriations.

The program management office (PMO) for the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) has launched an initiative that seeks to train liaisons in sharing resources and knowledge about the cloud certification process.

FedRAMP said Wednesday that the PMO will implement a “train-the-trainer” model for liaisons at more than 30 participating agencies as part of the Agency Liaison Program to help facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration across the government.

The new initiative seeks to help industry and agencies advance cloud adoption efforts and sets up a formal feedback mechanism for process improvement. It was created in response to client feedback the PMO received from the ACT-IAC FedRAMP working group and the FedRAMP Ideation Challenge.

The FedRAMP PMO said it has had a kick-off meeting and initial training session with agency liaisons and will hold additional training sessions in July 2020.