The Air Force Installation and Mission Support Center has deployed a metrics-based framework to distribute command information in the cloud. The Installation Health Assessment platform works to evaluate the condition of different installation and mission support areas from different commands, the U.S. Air Force said Thursday.

USAF noted that the technology was initially developed to validate potential effects from infrastructure budget shortages on over 54,000 facilities and has been updated to accommodate nine additional areas including combat support and base communications.

“The IHA provides us a tool to not only consolidate all civil engineering data into a single, analysis platform but also visually communicate the highest mission needs against facility conditions.” said Col. John Schuliger, commander of 96th Civil Engineer Group at the Eglin Air Force Base.

AFIMSC intends to update the system with additional features and analytic functions regularly and is accepting suggestions in line with the platform.

Jose Arrieta, chief information officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, said HHS plans to team up with the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) to leverage the HHS Accelerate blockchain procurement system in identity management, Federal News Network reported Thursday. Arrieta said he plans to meet with DISA officials to discuss a pilot project to link the blockchain tool to a user’s mobile phone or wearable device to better track behavioral data for identity verification.

“They have the wireless device, they have the behavioral capability to actually determine identity with a high-level confidence score. Now they need a network of nodes to test that,” he said of the proposed project.

He said the pilot project, if successful, could enable first responders to skip multi-factor authentication to establish connectivity to secure networks. Arietta said HHS is also in discussions with the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Army to invest in the blockchain technology to facilitate data processing and sharing operations.

This article was written by Clay Goldwein and John Nemoto of CGI Federal. 

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) earlier this month released its 2020 to 2025 Strategy document which focuses on three main goals, the third of which outlines how the agency will invest in technology and partnerships to confront emerging threats. Based on this reveal, we thought it topical to outline not only the mission-specific challenges that are driving this IT modernization but also ways to help ease CBP’s transition to a secure cloud environment—a.k.a. the true enabler of IT modernization—as it shapes the future of the agency. In this article we’d like to outline what we believe are CBP’s challenges to this new approach, and in part 2, we’d like to follow up with a phased strategy ideally suited to help transition CBP to a hybrid cloud environment.

The opportunity for IT evolution at CBP is vast, as some of CBP’s systems are older and do not adequately support the 24/7 nature of CBP’s mission. Additionally, current systems were not designed to fully leverage the massive amounts of data available to agents and officers today. In this environment, IT modernization is not a luxury, but rather a necessity. For instance, Border Patrol agents would benefit significantly from more integrated, highly available systems with increased accessibility or offline capabilities in remote areas with limited connectivity. This sort of technology needs to be fully portable and connected, fitting on a phone or tablet rather than a laptop; and should help agents and officers collect data seamlessly and turn this data into near immediate tactical knowledge.

CBP’s IT modernization project must help the agency solve those everyday issues in addition to back-office (e.g., financial systems) applications that are sorely in need of upgrades. A shared platform featuring a standardized enterprise architecture will help agents and officers better solve challenges they face every day, as well as unseen ones they will encounter in the future.

While it’s important to implement a results-driven approach, it’s equally important to address the cultural challenges sure to follow in addition to the never-ending slew of legislative and regulatory changes. CBP and its technology partners will need to thread the needle just so to successfully help agents and officers navigate this culture change.

The critical piece to overcoming the cultural challenges will be effective, consistent, and frequent communication with the right people.  Within CBP, this process involves opening a two-way dialogue between CBP’s IT community and the Offices that execute the agency’s mission. From the operator at the border who depends on technology to perform their job duties on a daily basis to the Executive Assistant Commissioner who needs the right information to make financial decisions, establishing an aligning narrative across CBP’s strategic, operational, and tactical elements, where all CBP stakeholders “buy in” to the proposed solution, must be performed in parallel with implementation.

CBP will continue to reap the benefit from fully embracing SecDevOps as an incremental approach that can support a transition to implementation of an Agile methodology. Utilizing this approach shortens the systems development life cycle while rapidly delivering new features, adding repeatability and precision with regard to testing new applications.  It improves uptime, reduces time to market, and leads to higher quality software while reducing technical debt, positioning CBP to better address evolving challenges on the front lines. SecDevOps can also have a positive effect in the implementation of a cloud environment.

Cindy Daniell, director of research at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, said NGA plans to use machines and other technologies to enable analysts to automate routine tasks to focus on the decision-making process, C4ISRNET reported Wednesday.

“This is, the way we see it, a true human-machine partnership. It’s harnessing the scale, the speed, the power of the computer processing and the human cognition both doing the best at their particular capabilities,” Daniell said Monday at a panel during the GEOINT 2019 symposium.

She said the agency plans to advance the human-machine partnership through handheld devices designed to process geospatial intelligence data for warfighters on the battlefield and carry out their missions.

“They all need to be able to have geospatial intelligence to interact with their world. At Research, we see the future that the NGA will deliver persistent, real time, on demand, secure GEOINT to the field for tactical and strategic missions,” said Daniell.

Daniell said NGA is developing an analytic tool that could help troops identify and locate adversaries.