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GovCon Expert Dana Barnes: Visibility, Managing Devices Are Key Challenges for Federal Agencies
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GovCon Expert Dana Barnes: Visibility, Managing Devices Are Key Challenges for Federal Agencies

Dana Barnes, senior vice president of Palo Alto Networks’ Public Sector and a 2022 Wash100 Award winner, recently spoke with Cyberscoop to discuss how visibility, access points and managing devices for the workforce are the most significant challenges for federal agencies. 

GovCon Expert Dana Barnes explained the most necessary changes the federal government needs to make to address these challenges, which includes a shift in the way people are working both from home and in the office following the pandemic. As a result, devices have become much harder to manage and the access points have particularly become more difficult to manage. 

As Dana Barnes was asked about how well equipped federal agencies are today compared to past years, the two-time Wash100 winner noted that the government has made significant strides to improve cybersecurity for years.

“I think it varies by agency, but the government has generally made significant strides to improve cybersecurity year after year after year,” GovCon Expert Dana Banes explained. 

“With the funding that has come through and the recent infrastructure bills that have been passed, you’re gonna see that improvement continue. However, some government agencies do have deeper pockets and are able to adapt more quickly to these changes. However, everyone is moving in the right direction and they’re better off today than they were before.”

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Barry Duplantis to Lead Government Solutions at Mattermost; Paul Smith Appointed Board Advisor
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Barry Duplantis to Lead Government Solutions at Mattermost; Paul Smith Appointed Board Advisor

Two executives, Barry Duplantis and Paul Smith, have gained new roles at the open source communication platform provider Mattermost.

Duplantis will ascend from his current position as vice president of customer success and support to head up the government solutions division and Smith will reside on Mattermost’s public sector board of advisors, the Palo Alto, California-based company said Friday.

As Mattermost Government Solutions leader, Duplantis will be tasked with tailoring the company’s platform and services to the objectives and requirements of various federal government agencies.

The latter executive has been with Mattermost for nearly a year and a half. Before coming aboard, he oversaw customer response and support initiatives at Red Hat and Hortonworks and spearheaded support and services at organizations like HackerOne, Hewlett Packard and OpsWare.

In addition to customer support, Duplantis specializes in crisis management and logistics. He was a special forces officer in the U.S. Army, so he brings a familiarity with military and defense needs to his new job liaising with DoD officials.

“As global tensions continue to rise, the Department of Defense increasingly needs a mission-focused secure collaboration platform for coordination with mission partners,” Duplantis shared.

Smith is expected to leverage an over three-decade career partnering with federal government entities on behalf of technology companies. For 17 years he worked at Red Hat as senior vice president and general manager of public sector business, wherein he was a seasoned marketer of the company’s own open source communication platform.

In his new advisory role, Smith said he looks forward to “identifying new use cases for its technology” and “work[ing] closely alongside Barry and the rest of the Mattermost team to expand their presence within the public sector.”

First up on Duplantis’ docket is a recently announced Small Business Innovation Research Phase II contract to assist the Air Force with creating a mission-specific collaboration platform.

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Cybercrime Reporting Bill Gets Biden’s Signature
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Cybercrime Reporting Bill Gets Biden’s Signature

President Joe Biden signed into law Thursday a bipartisan bill to establish a data collection system for federal law enforcement agencies to measure and track cybercrime.

The Better Cybercrime Metrics Act requires the Department of Justice to enlist the National Academy of Sciences for a taxonomy development project and to integrate data on cases into the National Incident Based Reporting System, the office of Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., said Thursday.

Spanberger introduced the bill in the House of Representatives in August last year. Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, led companion legislation that passed in the Senate in December.

“One year ago this week, we saw the damaging effects of the ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline,” said the representative from Virginia.

“And as cybercriminals increasingly adapt their methods of attack against vulnerable people and networks, the United States must improve our cybercrime classification system. Otherwise, we are risking the safety and privacy of American families, homes, businesses, and government agencies.”

A Jan. 27 Congressional Budget Office report estimated that the implementation of law provisions requiring DOJ to make a contract with the NAS nonprofit organization to build the classification system and update the National Crime Victimization Survey would cost the department $3 million.

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Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner: DISA Seeks Industry Support for Network Scalability
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Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner: DISA Seeks Industry Support for Network Scalability

Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and a 2022 Wash100 Award winner, said the agency is looking to implement technologies that can support a large-scale network in partnership with the commercial sector.

Skinner presented his vision for the agency at AFCEA’s TechNet Cyber forum using a list of 14 “Wouldn’t it be cool if” questions to drive a conversation with potential industry partners, DISA said Thursday.

Topics on the list include cloud deployment, network transportation, risk management, battlespace visualization and DevSecOps.

“DevSecOps is pretty cool if you have a modern application and leverage a modern language and modern technology,” Skinner said.

“What about the legacy applications? How do we truly bring DevSecOps to a legacy environment?”

The agency encourages companies and academic institutions to propose technical ideas through the DISAWERX collaboration platform or apply to demonstrate technology via its weekly Technical Exchange Meeting event.

Mitre Aims to Help Government, Industry Explore ‘Strategic Competition’ Through New Center
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Mitre Aims to Help Government, Industry Explore ‘Strategic Competition’ Through New Center

Mitre has launched a center to help the country’s U.S. public and private sector leaders gain an insight into military competition below armed conflict and other related areas.

The Center for Strategic Competition seeks to combine the nonprofit corporation’s technical services with analytics and modeling tools to support decision-makers, Mitre said Thursday.

Ashton Carter, who served as the 25th Department of Defense secretary, delivered a speech at the center’s launch event.

“We need to, as ever in our post-World War II history, have a close and constructive relationship between the wider technology sector outside of defense and the needs of the country,” said Carter, who is also a visiting fellow at Mitre.

Beth Meinert, a Mitre vice president, said the opening of the new center culminates a two-year effort to create a framework and an analysis technology suite intended for data-driven strategic competition assessment work.

DOD Announces $2.3B in Efforts to Address Carbon Pollution; Jennifer Granholm Quoted
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DOD Announces $2.3B in Efforts to Address Carbon Pollution; Jennifer Granholm Quoted

The Department of Energy looks to advance geologic carbon storage initiatives under a $2.25 billion effort funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to help lessen carbon dioxide pollution and mitigate climate change impacts.

The Carbon Storage Assurance Facility Enterprise Initiative is focused on carbon capture and storage technologies that could accommodate at least 50 million metric tons of CO2 from power plants, industrial facilities and other point sources, DOE said Thursday.

A notice of intent for the Phases III, III.5 and IV of CarbonSAFE program was recently released to kick off the investment distribution process. The initiative will cover CCS project development’s construction stages and other activities.

“The President’s budget commitments coupled with the investments from his Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will enable the U.S. to develop cutting-edge technologies to safely and efficiently capture, remove, and store CO2 while revitalizing communities that have powered this nation for generations,” said Jennifer Granholm, secretary of the DOE.

Aside from the multibillion initiative, the department has also announced $91 million in two new funding opportunities to add more CO2 storage sites and further develop carbon management technologies.

The second phase of the CarbonSAFE program is for storage complex flexibility and is allocated $45 million. Meanwhile, the Carbon Management funding opportunity is worth $46 million and is for the development of technologies for removing, capturing and converting or storing carbon dioxide emissions.

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DOD IG Audits Efforts of VA, Pentagon to Achieve EHR Interoperability
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DOD IG Audits Efforts of VA, Pentagon to Achieve EHR Interoperability

The Department of Defense’s office of inspector general conducted a joint audit of the efforts of DOD and the Department of Veterans Affairs to achieve interoperability with regard to their electronic health record systems and found that both agencies took action by acquiring Cerner’s Millennium EHR platform and introducing the Joint Health Information Exchange.

However, VA and DOD did not take all necessary measures to achieve interoperability, such as migrating patient health care data from legacy EHR systems to Cerner Millennium to create a single patient EHR and developing interfaces from all medical devices to the new EHR platform in order for patient health care data to automatically upload to the system from those devices, according to OIG’s report released Thursday.

According to the audit, DOD had deployed Cerner Millennium at its 49 health care facilities and VA fielded the platform at one of its facilities as of December.

The report offers several recommendations to the director of the Federal Electronic Health Record Modernization Program Office.

These include determining the type of health care data that constitutes a complete EHR; developing and implementing a plan for moving legacy patient healthcare data needed for a complete EHR; and executing a plan to modify user roles under Cerner Millennium to ensure that users are given access to patient health care information needed to carry out job responsibilities.

The Pentagon plans to field Cerner Millennium at 490 health facilities by 2023, while VA intends to implement the EHR system at 1,454 health care sites by 2028, according to the report.

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NavalX Partners With DEFENSEWERX to Accelerate Tech Transfer; Capt. Benjamin Van Buskirk Quoted
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NavalX Partners With DEFENSEWERX to Accelerate Tech Transfer; Capt. Benjamin Van Buskirk Quoted

The U.S. Navy’s innovation and agility cell, NavalX, and DEFENSEWERX have signed a partnership intermediary agreement to help speed up technology transfer process within the Department of the Navy, DVIDS reported Tuesday.

“The Navy has been pushing non-FAR [federal acquisition regulation] based contracts and agreements in order to complement traditional government acquisition programs to transition technology to the warfighter,” said Capt. Benjamin “Nut” Van Buskirk, director of NavalX.

“This PIA will allow for more clear communication with our industrial base, accelerating our ability to partner with industry to adapt emerging capabilities into dual-use products that can scale into defense,” added Van Buskirk.

The agreement seeks to expedite tech transfer by engaging industry and academia on behalf of the government. The PIA intends to deliver services to facilitate cooperative research, development, engineering and testing activities among educational institutions and small businesses, including prototyping assistance and tech scanning.

DEFENSEWERX will provide the facilities and personnel to deploy initiatives under the PIA.

DEFENSEWERX is a 501(c)(3) organization that helps link an international network of public agencies, businesses, academia and individuals to enable the development of innovative platforms.

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NIST Revises Cybersecurity Supply Chain Risk Management Guidance; Angela Smith Quoted
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NIST Revises Cybersecurity Supply Chain Risk Management Guidance; Angela Smith Quoted

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has updated its cybersecurity guidance for supply chain risk management in accordance with a cybersecurity executive order signed in May 2021.

The revised publication provides key practices that can be adopted by organizations as they build up their capability to manage cybersecurity risks across and within supply chains and encourages them to look at the vulnerabilities associated with the finished product and its components, NIST said Thursday.

“Organizations need to have greater assurance that what they are purchasing and using is trustworthy. This new guidance can help you understand what risks to look for and what actions to consider taking in response,” said Angela Smith, an information security specialist at NIST and one of the publication’s authors.

The guidance underscores the importance of risk monitoring and seeks to help organizations build into their acquisition processes requirements and considerations for cyber supply chain risks.

The publication also looks at potential cyber vulnerabilities within the sources of code, for instance, as it recognizes the possible emergence of cyber risks at any point or link in the supply chain.

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LinQuest Assists Air Force with Digital Engineering, Modeling
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LinQuest Assists Air Force with Digital Engineering, Modeling

Defense contractor LinQuest has recently deepened its digital engineering capabilities, shifting the prioritization of various technological approaches to match its U.S. Department of Defense clients’ needs.

Specifically, the LinQuest team has been tasked with duties surrounding the WeaponONE initiative at Eglin Air Force Base and a modeling-focused project to help the Air Force Research Lab modernize strategic development planning procedures, the Los Angeles, California-based company said on April 20.

“[LinQuest’s] outstanding support is critical to realizing our vision of the digital transformation of the weapons digital enterprise,” remarked James Sumpter, WeaponONE program manager at the AFRL.

The company’s role in helping shape WeaponONE has been ongoing for the last two years. W1 is a suite of programs that encompasses the weapons digital enterprise, the weapons Digital Twin Lab and a software factory/innovation center, as well as RogueONE, Data Prime and Digital Prime.

Harnessing tools such as agile project management approaches, commercial cloud and modeling, simulation and analysis, LinQuest is assisting to construct an open digital environment for the Air Force base. To do so they are collaborating with the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center Armament Directorate Weapons Systems Program Office and the weapon test wings within Eglin.

LinQuest’s engineering for the W1 government reference architecture entails implementing a model-based system in order to move away from document-based weapons acquisition, in addition to creating a replicable or reusable format for future digital weapons programs.

Their efforts, which draw heavily on model-based systems engineering strategies, have been honed on similar endeavors over the past several years with the U.S. Space Force.

Since January, LinQuest has been aiding warfighters’ combat effectiveness through the evolution of the AFRL’s strategic development planning processes from document-centered to model-based. To achieve this objective, the company has distinguished process inputs and outputs, fostered rapid analysis of traceability of the organization’s initiatives to Air Force requirements and developed auto-generation for the initiative roadmap.

LinQuest recently highlighted these accomplishments at the inaugural Department of Air Force Modeling and Simulation Summit at Eglin Air Force Base.

The contractor also landed a $48 million award from the AFRL in March, committing them to five years of engineering support for the artificial intelligence-powered aircraft Skyborg Vanguard Program.

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