The U.S. Army has provided $2.9M in funds to eight industry and academic partners to develop and implement prototypes into testbed systems under an Army Research Laboratory initiative.

The Scalable, Adaptive and Resilient Autonomy program seeks to accelerate research efforts in autonomous mobility in efforts to optimize decision-making capacities in austere environments through the usage of intelligent systems, the Army said Wednesday.

“Robotic and autonomous systems need the ability to enter into an unfamiliar area, without the ability to communicate and for which there are no maps showing terrain or structures, make sense of the environment, and perform safely and effectively at the Army’s operational tempo,” said Eric Spero, SARA program manager.

The program's initial sprint will focus on the rapid development of off-road maneuver technologies to address the Army's modernization objectives, while succeeding sprints will cover human-agent teaming as well as collaborative and heterogeneous behaviors.

The awardees are:

• Colorado School of Mines
• Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition
• General Electric
• Indiana University
• University of California, Berkeley
• University of Delaware
• University of Rochester
• University of Washington

Zscaler has been selected by the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) organization, to deliver a secure cloud management solution, the company reported on Friday.

“Zscaler will minimize the attack surface by directly connecting people to the internet and their applications. Our innovative approach also delivers a great experience for personnel no matter their location, device, or network, through our globally distributed cloud,” said Drew Schnabel, vice president of Federal at Zscaler.

Zscaler will provide zero trust access to protect DIU users and cloud services from cyberthreats, regardless of where personnel will work or what devices they will use. The company’s solution has the potential to scale to other DoD organizations through a production Other Transaction (OT) agreement.

DIU has enhanced U.S. national security through accelerating the adoption of commercial technology throughout the DoD. Zscaler ‘s platform will power DIU secure cloud management solution, allowing DIU users to securely access SaaS applications across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) and Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) will protect organizations across a multi-cloud environment with a wide range of applications and infrastructure including SaaS, PaaS and IaaS environments.

ZPA is the first zero trust remote access cloud service to achieve FedRAMP high authorization, and the Zscaler platform is in-process for Impact Level 4 and 5 authorization. ZIA is authorized as FedRAMP moderate and DOD Impact Level 2. Both ZIA and ZPA meet Trusted Internet Connection (TIC) 3.0 guidelines.

The company will provide security at scale to reach 500 thousand concurrent users and 1 million endpoints. Zscaler has developed the company’s solutions to handle an unlimited number of concurrent individual user connections. The platform has processed more than 100 billion transactions per day.

Zscaler has also integrated a true secure access services edge (SASE) to ensure that people can access the internet and applications with minimal latency from any device, bring your own device (BYOD) or government furnished equipment or location because the company’s cloud connection is local.

“Zscaler has been a zero trust leader since our inception, and we are proud to work with DIU to help protect the Department of Defense from adversaries threatening national security,” added Schnabel.

About Zscaler

Zscaler (NASDAQ: ZS) enables the world’s leading organizations to securely transform their networks and applications for a mobile and cloud-first world. Its flagship services, Zscaler Internet Access™ and Zscaler Private Access™, create fast, secure connections between users and applications, regardless of device, location, or network.

Zscaler services are 100 percent cloud-delivered and offer the simplicity, enhanced security, and improved user experience that traditional appliances are unable to match. Used in more than 185 countries, Zscaler operates a multi-tenant distributed cloud security platform, protecting thousands of customers from cyberattacks and data loss.

Mark Lewis, director of research and engineering for modernization at the Department of Defense (DoD), DoD has begun to adopt “zero trust” model to speed up the acquisition of microelectronics and strengthen security, FedScoop reported Thursday.

Zero trust architecture requires continuous verification as users try to access resources on a network regardless of their relationship to an organization or physical location.

“We’ve seen a number of examples where the biggest threats that we face often are the insider threat. It’s the people inside the fence line, behind the guards, who we think we’ve cleared,” Lewis said at an AFCEA virtual symposium. “They’re the ones that pose the biggest threats to us.”

Lewis also shared his insights on the "trusted foundry" method compared with zero trust.

Michael Kratsios, U.S. chief technology officer and a 2020 Wash100 Award winner, wrote in a commentary published Wednesday on The Wall Street Journal about the launch of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence by tech ministers of the Group of Seven, an international economic organization composed of seven countries.

Kratsios, who also serves as deputy assistant to the president for technology policy, said GPAI will bring together professionals from governments, academia, industry and civil society to pursue AI-related research and advance workforce development efforts to promote AI innovation.

“In this new forum, like-minded nations will work together to encourage the development of AI in line with our shared values,” he wrote. “Most immediately, GPAI members will commit to developing and using AI responsibly to fight the coronavirus pandemic—including efforts to speed up drug discovery, improve disease diagnosis, and aid telehealth services.”

The establishment of GPAI is one of the efforts G7 science and tech ministers will work on in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The partnership is part of the G7 declaration unveiled Thursday.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has found that some federal agencies had “conflicting parameters” for their cybersecurity requirements for ensuring the secure access and use of government data.

GAO said in its report released Wednesday that it assessed the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Social Security Administration (SSA) and FBI as part of its study and found that the total amount of conflicting parameters among the four agencies reached 49 to 79 percent.

Such parameters include specific values such as the number of unsuccessful logins needed before locking out users.

According to the watchdog, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) must improve its coordination efforts to properly establish cybersecurity parameters among federal agencies.

GAO noted that federal entities previously reported spending $45 million on assessments of state agencies' cybersecurity posture during fiscal years 2016 through 2018.