The National Institute of Standards and Technology inaugurated a large solar energy array during the agency’s celebration of Earth Day. The array consists of 15,000 panels and is built to provide over 8 million killowatt-hours of energy in the agency’s facility in Gaithersburg, Md., NIST said Monday.

The agency noted that the array will mitigate the release of approximately 6,200 metric tons of annual carbon emissions based from a formula created by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In addition, the array will potentially help NIST save $3.5 million in expenses for the next two decades.

The infrastructure was constructed by Exelon’s Constellation company under a contract award from the Department of Energy. The firm will also maintain and replace the array’s components for 20 years as part of contract work.

The U.S. Air Force tapped Austrian tech company Frequentis to provide virtual air traffic control systems by October, National Defense reported Thursday.

Mark Robinson, head of air traffic management at Frequentis, said at the Avalon Airshow in Australia that the company will deliver a total of four fixed and deployable smartVISION tower systems consisting of cameras, high-fidelity monitors and surveillance technologies designed for aircraft identification. Robinson noted that the cameras, which cost up to $3 million, have the capacity to monitor airspace and transmit visual data to locations as far as 1,000 miles away. 

Ed Wright, executive director of the Air Force Flight Standards Agency, said in a statement that Frequentis’ air traffic management system can “reduce the risk to controllers and infrastructure, while reducing capital investments and allowing for the optimization of our resources.” Civilian customers in New Zealand, Argentina and Germany have previously purchased smartVISION systems from the Vienna-based firm. 

Department of Defense officials said the U.S. Air Force developed the first iteration of a cyber platform designed to help cyber forces perform mission planning, share information and deliver command-and-control systems to support cyber missions, Fifth Domain reported Monday.

A spokesman for the Air Force said the service handed over to U.S. Cyber Command the first increment of the Unified Platform April 9. Increment 1 features capabilities for interoperability and defensive cyber operations.

According to the report, the service plans to allocate $100M in 2020 funds for the Unified Platform, which is meant to serve as a tactical cyber operations system to enable individual cyber teams to facilitate coordination and carry out operations.

The Air Force tapped Northrop Grumman in October to serve as a systems coordinator for the platform. In February, the service selected Northrop, Lockheed Martin, ManTech International, Accenture and General Dynamics’ One Source business for the cyber enterprise services contract.

The U.S. Air Force continues to implement a new process that reduces the time required for securing authority to operate information technology tools from a year to just weeks, FedScoop reported Monday. The service is using Fast Track ATO that Matt Donovan, undersecretary for the branch, unveiled in March to allow officials to speed up deployment and assessment of new software and systems. 

Wanda Jones-Heath, chief information security officer for the Air Force, said Fast Track helped the service improve risk assessment and address vulnerabilities faster than previous processes.  

“The penetration testing finds it and fixes it up front,” she said. “The continuous monitoring actually finds it continuously and then you’re able to keep moving.”

Through the same ATO process, Air Force officials plan to standardize bug bounties and “third-party adversarial testing.” Jones-Heath said the service has a list of additional systems it wants to put under Fast Track for deployment. 

Two years after the launch of the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program’s Tailored baseline for low-impact software-as-a-service, 25 percent of participating agencies secured authorization for their cloud services. FedRAMP announced Thursday that 11 cloud services were implemented with the authorization. 

The program was introduced to speed up process for agencies to partner with cloud service providers and to secure an authorization. In 2018, the government authorized cloud services in less than 90 days.

“Tailored empowers agencies to define the use case for SaaS services, evaluate risk and tailor security requirements,” FedRAMP said. 

The Tailored baseline also guides agencies in risk management, consolidates security and assessment data and assists in managing low-risk SaaS products. To speed up authorization, the FedRAMP Program Management Office said agencies and cloud service providers should focus on public-private partnerships, transparency of software security, security requirements, selecting the right stakeholders and coordination with the program office.