A brigade combat team under the U.S. Army’s 1st Cavalry Division will be the last unit to use the Enhanced Position Location Reporting System as the service branch moves to update its communications network, the Army reported Tuesday.

EPLRS is a data networking platform designed to distribute information and report position location through the use of tactical radios.

The 1st Brigade Combat Team is scheduled to complete EPLRS divestment in February 2017 as it transitions to the Blue Force Tracker 2, Joint Battle Command-Platform and Joint Capabilities Release software platforms that work to provide soldiers with a satellite communications link characterized as beyond-line-of-sight.

“There is a huge logistical and sustainment trail that goes along with legacy systems the longer they stay out in the field,” said Lt. Col. Michael Olmstead, product manager of JBC-P under the Project Manager Mission Command.

“The more baselines – the more it costs to sustain the entire family of systems,” Olmstead added.

The service branch’s move to divest legacy systems is part of its effort to facilitate the deployment of new systems to uniformed personnel, according to the report.

The Department of Homeland Security has licensed a Pacific Northwest National Laboratory-built cyber risk assessment platform for commercial use.

DHS’ science and technology directorate handed the Physical and Cyber Risk Analysis Tool to New Mexico-based vulnerability analysis tool developer RhinoCorps as part of the Transition to Practice program of the directorate’s cybersecurity division, DHS said Wednesday.

RhinoCorps plans to integrate PACRAT with Simajin, a tool designed to assess physical network vulnerabilities, in an effort to develop a platform that works to help users evaluate their physical and cybersecurity postures.

“Securing both the physical and cyber domains are essential to securing an organization’s infrastructure and currently all assessment tools on the market only observe one or the other domain,” said Mike Pozmantier, TPP program manager.

PACRAT is the fifth cyber tool that DHS has licensed under the TPP program, which has more than 20 other platforms that are scheduled to transition into the commercial market.

Casey Coleman, group vice president for federal civilian agencies at Unisys, has called for new approaches for the protection of federal data and networks.

“[Traditional] perimeter-based defenses are not going to keep attackers out 100 percent of the time,” Coleman wrote in a guest piece published Tuesday on the Federal Times.

She said IT teams should work to reduce the damage of cyber attacks in case of a systems breach as well as continue efforts to keep attackers at bay.

Coleman also highlighted what Federal CIO Tony Scott calls the “secure by design” concept, which puts security as part of the production stage for IT systems rather than adding security measures at a later time.

She said the “secure by design” concept requires building system architectures to work in the cloud, implementing multi-factor authentication and utilizing software-defined or virtualized networks, among others.

According to Coleman, the government has also pursued other approaches to address cybersecurity challenges, including the planned hiring of a federal chief information security officer and policy directives such as the Cybersecurity National Action Plan.

Together with the “secure by design” approach, these activities by the government cover the people, process and technology factors that impact IT initiatives, Coleman said.