The U.S. Army held an industry day Thursday at the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental facility in Silicon Valley as part of a challenge that aims to evaluate and buy prototypes of cyber platforms from small businesses, the Army reported Friday.

Claire Heininger writes at least 60 companies participated in the third Cyber Innovation Challenge that seeks software platforms to manage the service branch’s hardware suites or micro-clouds for defensive missions.

“Cyber space moves too fast for the Army to start from scratch and develop our own kit when the solutions are already out there in industry,” said Douglas Wiltsie, executive director of the system of systems engineering and integration directorate under the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology.

“By tapping into commercial innovation and putting prototypes in the hands of soldiers early in the process, the Army also gets smarter on our enduring acquisition strategies for cyber equipment.”

The service branch plans to issue a summary of requirements for software tools in April and then assess selected prototypes through technical demonstrations.

“This model allows us to reach innovators who rarely or never work with the military,” Wiltsie added.

Two vendors that took part in the first challenge in 2015 are scheduled to deliver in April their prototypes of infrastructure kits that work to support the military branch’s cyber protection teams.

The Army also plans to award contracts in the summer of 2016 for prototypes of cyberspace analytics tools as part of the second Cyber Innovation Challenge.

U.K. Defense Secretary Michael Fallon has said his agency will spend approximately $57 million on a new cybersecurity center to be potentially located at the defense ministry’s Corsham office.

The British defense ministry said Friday the Cyber Security Operations Center will employ cybersecurity professionals who will work to further protect the country’s networks and systems from cyber threats.

The ministry added the CSOC seeks to build on the government’s strategic defense and security review, which looks to bolster the country’s cyber defense in the next five years.

Fallon said the increasing budget will help the defense ministry stay ahead of cyberspace challenges.

The CSOC will also oversee the sharing of the defense ministry’s cybersecurity challenges among government agencies, allies and industry stakeholders as part of the National Cyber Security Center initiative, MoD said.

Two component agencies of the Agriculture Department will implement commercial network security tools from a continuous diagnostic and mitigation program run by the Department of Homeland Security, Federal News Radio reported Monday.

Jason Miller writes USDA chose its Food Safety and Inspection Service and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service organizations to test a set of tools built by Forescout and several other cybersecurity vendors that support the federal CDM initiative.

“We do expect to learn a lot, frankly, I think, as soon as they turn the devices on,” Janet Stevens, FSIS’ chief information officer, told Federal News Radio.

“Then we will need to evaluate not only our processes but do we have the right tools to analyze this information and make decisions on it,” Stevens added.

The report said she will prioritize adoption of agile development and DevOps strategies as well as cloud computing and analytics technologies at FSIS.

The General Services Administration has moved to retire its National Electronic Accounting and Reporting platform as part of ongoing information technology modernization efforts at the agency.

GSA said Monday it will import agency-wide accounts receivable and billing functions into a modern financial management infrastructure known as Pegasys and run by the Agriculture Department.

“Decommissioning NEAR is a natural outcome of GSA’s focus on replacing antiquated systems with secure, modern and customer-oriented systems,” noted GSA Chief Information Officer David Shive.

The transition to Pegasys system is projected to help the agency offset more than $7 million in financial IT costs a year.

GSA and USDA partnered to integrate NEAR functionality into the financial shared-services platform under the enterprise-wide Billing and Accounts Receivable Project.

Lt. Gen. Robert Ferrell, the Army‘s chief information officer, has released a document that aims to provide the service branch a strategic guide on how it will update its enterprise networks between 2025 and 2040.

Shaping the Army Network: 2025-2040 is based on the Army Operating Concept and works in support of the Army Network Campaign Plan’s information technology baseline through the identification of science and IT requirements.

The document outlines five network capability areas Ferrell said the service branch needs to focus on in order to meet operational information requirements and maintain its technological edge by 2040.

Areas include cybersecurity and resiliency, data to decisive action, robotics and autonomous operations, dynamic transport, computing and edge sensors, and human cognitive enhancement.

Ferrell also called on the U.S. military to apply data analytics, supercomputing and other emerging technology platforms as well as monitor the prevalence of data processing and transmission speed.