Officials from the Department of the Navy have signed an agreement to stand up an office that would modernize procurement management.

The new Acquisition Modernization Office, part of Naval Facilities Engineering Command, would look into approaches that support procurement across U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps installation commands, DON said Wednesday.

AMO's establishment also aims to bolster DON's capacity to pursue contractual matters and installation-related leases.

“This Acquisition Modernization Office will assist our base commanders in partnering with defense communities and private industry to identify and develop non-traditional solutions for traditional infrastructure, utility and base operating support requirements in order to increase Naval shore capabilities and resilience,” said Rear Adm. John Korka, who leads NAVFAC and will oversee AMO's creation.

The signed agreement grants AMO an initial three-year operating term that the office would use to demonstrate viability.

“AMO provides Navy a new capability to finance unprogrammed shore requirements with greater speed and agility by partnering with the private sector on strategic joint ventures,” said John Kliem, who will lead AMO as director.

VMware has released the Carbon Black ‘2020 Cybersecurity Outlook’ report on Thursday, which has provided a holistic analysis of how attackers have evolved, what defenders have done to stay ahead of the curve and how security and IT teams can work together to enhance its protective software moving forward. 

“We need IT teams to look toward security solutions that are built in and not bolted on. It’s time for security to become part of our organizational DNA. It’s time security becomes intrinsic to how we build, deploy and maintain technology,” said Rick McElroy, one of the report’s authors.

VMware utilized the MITRE ATT&CK framework to conduct Section I of the research. The report analyzed the top attack tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) throughout 2019 and provided specific guidance on ransomware, commodity malware, wipers, access mining and destructive attacks.

In Section II of the report, VMware Carbon Black collaborated with Forrester Consulting on a 624-person survey, including IT and security managers, CIOs and CISOs to explore the current state of IT and security relationship dynamics from the C-level to the practitioner level, and how they will evolve.

The report revealed that attacker behavior has become more evasive, showing that attackers are increasingly attempting to circumvent legacy security solutions. Defense evasion behavior was seen in more than 90 percent of the 2,000 attack samples we analyzed.

Defense evasion behaviors have been continuously used in ransomware; the report found it was integrated in 95 percent of analyzed samples. These ransomware attacks are heavily targeting organizations in energy, government and manufacturing sectors.

VMware noted that IT and security teams generally share common goals, including preventing breaches, efficiency and incident resolution, but 77.4 percent of survey respondents said IT and security currently have a negative relationship. 55 percent of survey respondents said that fostering collaboration across IT and security teams should be the organization’s top priority. 

Additionally, over 50 percent of survey respondents said that both security and IT will share responsibility for key areas like endpoint security, security architecture and identity and access management.

“Defenders must stop thinking about how to achieve results on their own. Defenders must continue to build bridges with IT teams. The time for cooperation is now. We can no longer afford to go at this problem alone,” added McElroy. 

About VMware

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NTT DATA has completed the first phase of building a digital archive system for the ASEAN Cultural Heritage Digital Archive (ACHDA) project to help digitize valuable historical cultural heritage of ASEAN countries, the company announced on Wednesday.

“It is my sincere hope that the value of this initiative will be widely known throughout ASEAN, and that by conveying the precious cultural assets of the present to future generations, new culture will be fostered,” said Katsuichi Sonoda, senior vice president of NTT DATA.

NTT DATA’s digital archive was developed by integrating 160 cultural assets from Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia. The cultural heritage archive will be made publicly available for anyone in the world to view online at the ACHDA website after Feb. 27, 2020.

ASEAN’s ACHDA project has enabled the digitization of 3D objects, including shape, color and texture data to be preserved and made available to the public. This has been achieved by expanding the capabilities of our digital archiving solution AMLAD to prevent cultural heritage assets from being lost due to disasters, accidents, and aging and to allow long-term preservation.

NTT DATA’s system will support the images, audio recordings and video data that are available on other NTT DATA digital archive systems, as well as an expanded capability to handle three-dimensional models of physical objects.

The second phase of the project has been expected to begin in fiscal year 2020 and will digitally archive cultural assets from Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar and Laos to make the countries historical evidence available on the archive site.

Going forward, the project will be expanded to include all ten ASEAN member states in the future. The project has been funded by Japan-ASEAN Integration Fund (JAIF), established in 2006 with the contribution from the Japanese government.

Future work is being considered by the ASEAN Secretariat, and NTT DATA plans to further contribute to ASEAN by digitizing cultural heritage assets and building a sustainable digital archive system in all 10 ASEAN countries.

About NTT DATA

At NTT DATA Services, we drive outcomes that keep our clients a step ahead in this digitally dynamic world. Headquartered in Plano, Texas, our team of more than 50,000 professionals worldwide works with you to address today’s challenges, and tomorrow’s — whether it’s to help jump-start your cloud migration, reinvent the customer experience, streamline business processes or upgrade aging infrastructure.