Stuart McGuigan, chief information officer of the State Department, said he would establish new architecture principles and capabilities to enhance information technology across the agency, FedScoop reported Thursday. 

“It’s important to have data, application and technology architecture,” McGuigan said. “Sometimes we default to technology architecture, but you really need the other two to drive your decisions in technology.”

Recently, he gathered all of State Department’s IT leaders and projects for the Digital Diplomacy Council to discuss cybersecurity reliability and enterprise architecture. McGuigan said that the agency is also utilizing the cloud through President Trump’s latest Cloud Smart strategy. 

The State Department runs 277 posts in the U.S. and abroad, which provide IT services and support programs to government customers. 

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has added new information security strategies in an existing recommendation document for nonfederal organizations. NIST said Wednesday that it released a companion draft containing new recommendations for the existing publication entitled Protecting Controlled Unclassified Information in Nonfederal Systems and Organizations.

“We need to provide safeguards and countermeasures that can stand up to these attacks,” said Ron Ross, a NIST fellow who co-authored the publication.

The companion draft features recommendations for protecting controlled unclassified information with higher exposure risks. The agency calls for organizations to comment on both main and companion drafts for input. Interested parties may submit responses through July 19, 2019.

Maxar Technologies announced on Friday that the all-electric EUTELSAT 7C communications satellite performed according to plan after the satellite was launched aboard an Ariane 5 rocket from the Arianespace launch base in Kourou, French Guiana and will soon begin providing broadcast services for Eutelsat customers.

Once in service, EUTELSAT 7C will deliver high-quality broadcast services to multiple regions, including Africa, the Middle East and Turkey. Based on Maxar’s decades-proven 1300-class platform, EUTELSAT 7C is equipped with 44 Ku-band transponders and a steerable antenna beam, which enables Eutelsat to adjust coverage as needed while the satellite is on-orbit.

The satellite also carries a highly innovative photonics payload, which will demonstrate technologies to enable more efficient payload designs in the future.

“An innovative and reliable spacecraft manufacturer for more than 60 years, Maxar Space Solutions has built and launched 280 spacecraft with a combined 2,200 years of on-orbit service. EUTELSAT 7C is the third satellite built by Maxar for Eutelsat,” said Megan Fitzgerald, Maxar’s senior vice president and General Manager of Space Solutions.

“I would like to thank our long-term customer, Eutelsat, for their collaborative working relationship and forward-leaning approach to integrating cutting-edge technologies that result in superior satellite capability to meet next-generation broadcast demand.”

The U.S. Marine Corps received the first laser weapon approved by the Department of Defense for ground operations. Marines will test and evaluate the Compact Laser Weapons System that works to counter unmanned aerial systems. The service said Wednesday DoD plans to deploy CLaWS across the military as a component to a larger system used to counter drones.

“We’re providing CLaWS to Marines as a rapid prototype for evaluation,” said Don Kelley, program manager for ground based air defense at Program Executive Officer Land Systems. “Depending on the results, CLaWS could become part of a larger capability set.”

Lt. Col. Ho Lee, a product manager at PEO Land Systems, said they used commercial technologies and resources across DoD to build CLaWS. CLaWS is in prototype stage and developers plan to integrate the technology with more fixed-site and mobile C-UAS defeat capabilities. The Marine Corps is expected to begin testing the technology over the coming months.  

The General Services Administration has recognized the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s cloud initiative as a model example of smart cloud migration. NOAA built its enterprise-level cloud platform from multiple cloud service providers to employ a diverse set of technical features, Bill Zielinski wrote on a blog posted Tuesday on the General Services Administration’s website.

The weather forecast agency is migrating its operations and big data to cloud, with over 40 datasets already moved. NOAA states its objectives, instead or required work, to define the agency’s cloud needs during solicitations. NOAA’s contracting companies use these objectives as basis when forming responses.

“NOAA works with five commercial cloud providers to see how their services can facilitate full and open data access to the taxpayer and to foster innovation by leveraging new automation tools to make data more readily accessible,” the weather forecast agency said in a business brief.