Ken Bible, deputy chief information officer at the U.S. Marine Corps, said the service intends to divest some of its legacy communications and weapons systems to equip its future force with cloud and modernized network infrastructure, FCW reported Tuesday.

“We’re trading artillery and cannons and tanks in order to get after command and control modernization, electronic warfare, alternatives for positioning, navigation and timing, long range fires,” Bible said Friday at a virtual AFCEA NOVA event.

He mentioned the tactical deployment of the Marine Corps Enterprise Network and the need for the service to address future network requirements.

“I need to be able to have communications paths that can’t be disrupted,” Bible said. “I need to be able to have different models of how I do intensely computational capabilities with organic sensors at the edge rather than necessarily always being connected robustly on the larger enterprise.”

Pam Wolfe, chief of enterprise services division at NASA, said the space agency is working on a robotic process automation security plan to help facilitate the deployment of unattended bots, Federal News Network reported Tuesday.

She said the RPA security plan seeks to provide internal systems administrators information on the security vetting process for unattended bots and how the bots will process data and gain access to other systems.

Wolfe added that such a plan will also demonstrate some of the “back-and-forth” between financial auditors who depend on unattended bots, officials who deploy such bots and security personnel who require insight into what the platforms are accessing.

“Auditors really like the thought of unattended bots because they can see that there’s a bot in the environment that’s performing that function. An attended bot uses the credentials of the individual, and therefore you don’t really necessarily realize that there is an automation being performed as those transactions are occurring,” Wolfe said.

NASA has six unattended bots in testing and development phases and another six in the production stage.

The U.S. Air Force prepares to roll out a dashboard designed to support the management of custodial services across installations.

Air Force Installation Contracting Center will implement the custodial services dashboard that allows base operators to manage costs and categories of essential services and goods, USAF said Monday.

The dashboard works to collect custodial-related data that people in charge may use to manage expenses. Custodial services help bases protect finances.

“By having this data in one location, we can see what each base spends by cost per square foot and determine who is spending more than others, what’s the Air Force average and what we can do to drive best practices and keep costs under control,” said Chris Hoff, facilities and construction category advisor at AFICC.

AFICC worked together with experts from Air Force Installation and Mission Support Center and contractor personnel to develop the dashboard.

NASA has selected the University of Colorado Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics to develop a new solar sensor under an $18M contract.

The Total and Spectral Solar Irradiance Sensor-2 would continue the mission of the first TSIS, an existing space sensor designed to measure the sun’s radiation that reaches Earth, NASA said Monday. TSIS-1 launched in 2017.

TSIS-2 will consist of the Total Irradiance Monitor and the Spectral Irradiance Monitor, two instruments needed to study different aspects of solar energy. TIM equips researchers with a tool to study the Earth’s primary source of solar energy, and SIM works to detect solar variability regions on the planet and in its atmosphere.

Work under the sole-source contract will take place through August 6.

Matthew Scholl, computer security division chief at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, said that agencies should assess user access and identity management controls as the government continues to implement telework, Nextgov reported Monday.

Scholl told attendees at a webinar hosted by Venable LLP that agencies must examine their use of trust algorithms and cryptographic management techniques as well as data loss prevention settings in a virtual private network.

He also cited the benefits of using zero-trust architectures and cloud computing for virtualization and network segmentation.

“We want to ensure that in these quick migrations that we’ve done, that we fully understand both the positives as well as some of the assumptions we’ve made about our security,” said Scholl.

“This is really the first time that everyone is sprinting in the same direction to really make a big change when it comes to cloud adoption,” noted Michael Duffy, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during the event.

According to Scholl, agencies must make sure to follow-up with cloud providers with regards to security protocols and potential migration issues.