When the White House issued Executive Order 14028, “Improving the Nation's Cybersecurity” in May 2021, it established the framework for the Office of Management and Budget’s January 2022 memorandum directing all agencies to implement a Federal Zero Trust Strategy. The Department of Defense has now released its own Zero Trust Strategy and Roadmap, which spells out its four high-level, integrated strategic goals in achieving ze...

Much of cybersecurity is focused on protecting users’ identities and personal information. This approach has numerous benefits, not just for the individual users but for the systems with which they interact – it protects people from malicious activities such as identity theft, while it also cuts down on bad actors stealing credentials to enter IT systems and wreak havoc, from ransomware to data exfiltration. The National Institute...

Many federal agencies, especially – but not limited to – the Department of Defense rely on warehousing as an essential part of their logistics operations and asset management strategies. The pandemic highlighted how quickly supply chain issues, especially with regard to IT, can snarl the availability of parts and finished products. Agencies dependent on the smooth flow of parts and finished products suffered in meeting their missio...

Government agencies below the federal level – whether state, local, tribal, or territorial (SLTT) – face the same cyber threats as their national counterparts, but without the same level of resources dedicated to their protection. To help address this problem, in September the Department of Homeland Security announced two new grant programs specifically to boost cybersecurity for SLTT agencies, and published the Notice of Funding O...

One of the major challenges for IT administrators and staff during the recent pandemic was the explosion of the network as working from home became the norm. Agencies that didn’t already have a good handle on the number of devices connected to their networks or how those devices were configured found themselves overwhelmed by the vast expansion of their vulnerable attack surface. Since that time, the attack surface has continued to expan...

The push for digital modernization by government at all levels has been under way for several years now. State and local governments had to scramble during the pandemic to find ways to support employees working remotely, adding momentum to the modernization push. Despite the need, IT budgets haven’t kept up – from staffing issues to costly legacy infrastructure, state and local agencies are struggling to find ways to maximize the v...

As agencies pursue their zero trust goals in line with Executive Order 14028, “Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity,” and the Office of Management and Budget’s memorandum setting a Federal Zero Trust Strategy, it is easy to focus on technology solutions. But that overlooks something fundamental about both the challenge and the purpose of moving to zero trust – the human beings that actually will use the redesigned...

Delivering excellent, equitable, and secure federal services for an outstanding customer experience is a priority that comes from the President’s Management Agenda. Achieving that goal can be helped by learning from a different mindset found mostly in the private sector – product management. Excellent experiences don’t just happen—they need to be designed in a deliberate manner. In a traditional software build, long per...

The Holy Grail of military operations over the centuries has been the ability to coordinate and command all the resources available for the mission. For millennia, it was how to coordinate land and sea operations. The 20th century saw the addition of air forces, and now it includes utilizing resources in space – true multi-domain operations. The Department of Defense’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) concept is a big p...

Government agencies at all levels, from the smallest town to the biggest federal offices, are struggling with filling job vacancies and retaining workers, especially for in-demand skills such as cybersecurity and IT management. For the U.S. government, strategic human capital management has been identified as a serious problem for more than 20 years. State and local agencies continue to feel the effects of both the pandemic and competition wit...