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...

In today’s digital world, IT modernization and cybersecurity are intertwined with delivering a vast range of state services to residents. According to the National Association of State CIOs, these were the top two concerns facing state governments in 2022. They are two reasons why the state of Florida in 2020 created the Florida Digital Service (FDS), to partner with all state agencies to deliver services. In a state that often faces nat...

Federal agencies have taken the lead in the public sector’s adoption of cloud computing. It has provided many benefits, including flexibility for applications, cost savings as legacy systems have been phased out, and empowering customers in their interactions with agencies – but it also has opened new methods for cyberattacks, such as corrupting elements of the software supply chain. As a result, data protection is more important t...

The COVID-19 pandemic forced public sector agencies across the country to rely on their IT to deliver services to customers. The “forced evolution” of systems can be seen as a long-term benefit, but it also amplified the vulnerability of communities to potentially serious cyberattacks. For instance, the threat of ransomware continues to grow as cyber criminals target managed service providers, the cloud, and the software supply cha...

Securing Your Networks From IPv6 Threats The explosion of Internet-connected devices – from mobile communications to the Internet of Things – demonstrates the need for the quantum increase in available IP addresses created by moving to IPv6. This webinar, the second of four sessions, addresses the unique strengths and security challenges of IPv6. The shift to IPv6 means that end-to-end encryption is built into devices and systems,...

Federal agencies are taking seriously the administration’s September 2024 deadline for implementing zero trust throughout government systems. When Executive Order 14028, “Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity,” was issued in May 2021, it set tight deadlines for agencies to meet zero trust requirements. One year after the EO was released, a survey found that two-thirds of agencies said they would meet the maturity require...

In June 2019 the Office of Management and Budget released MemorandumM-19-21, directing all Executive Branch departments and agencies to transition to fully digitize all permanent records by Dec. 31, 2022. But many agencies are going to miss that deadline. Between the scope of the requirements and the effects of the pandemic, fully one-third of agencies have indicated they are going to miss the deadline. The challenge is not simply digitizing r...