The Cybersecurity Executive Order released in May 2021 uses the word “data” more than two dozen times, referring to both data generated by the mandated cybersecurity measures and the government’s data more broadly. This increases the requirements for agencies to identify, classify, manage, and protect all their data, with particular emphasis on sensitive data. This webinar will feature thought leaders from government and indu...

Military and first responder deployments in harsh or hostile environments require enterprise-grade technology to deliver secure comms as well as compute to power applications critical for the demands of highly distributed tactical operations. It is also vital that these rugged IT systems are easy to deploy and can be managed with field operators, and not IT specialists. Agility is key and the days of packing in separate rackmount solutions for...

In the midst of the pandemic, just days after the state of Maryland discovered its first Omicron cases, the Maryland Health Department website had to go offline, reportedly because of a ransomware attack. Just a week later, the Virginia agency that provides IT and tech support for the state legislature, had to respond to its own ransomware attack. And agencies and companies alike are dealing with an attack on a third-party payroll company just...

On the evening of Jan. 20, 2022, President Biden will make his first State of the Union address – a good time to assess the condition of federal IT, particularly with regard to policy prescriptions that agencies must adopt, such as zero trust, to achieve greater cyber resilience. The foundation of the May 2021 Cybersecurity Executive Order is the directive for agencies to implement a zero trust architecture to strengthen their cyber defe...

Every federal agency recognizes that being audited is an often painful, always time-consuming process. The Department of Defense, for instance, has failed four audits in a row – but it is making progress after decades to keep its financial house in order. A Government Accountability Office report in 2020 identified several challenges that make it harder for agencies to earn clean fiscal bills of health, including problems with their fina...

The advent of cloud has been a boon to organizations, giving them the power and speed to vastly expand their compute capabilities. And the advent of cloud has created new security challenges, as enterprises have limited control, visibility, and network security across a hybrid cloud or multi-cloud environment. There are different approaches to providing security in a multi-cloud architecture, from relying upon cloud service providers’ ow...

It is easy to say, “Never trust – always verify.” It is much harder to put that philosophy into practice, even though zero trust is the foundation of the Cybersecurity Executive Order released in May. It is unprecedented for an EO to be so specific in its cybersecurity directives. Despite the EO, there is no single way to approach zero trust implementation. The National Security Agency released some guidance in February about...

There are plenty of positive quotes about teamwork, such as “There is no ‘I’ in team,” or “A team is more than a collection of people.” Another popular one is “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” But actually creating an effective and productive enterprise-wide team is much more difficult than just making up a catchphrase. Coming out of the pandemic is placing overwhelming pre...

The concept of zero trust is the core of the Cybersecurity Executive Order released in May. While its directives and deadlines apply to all federal agencies, it offers a useful model for state, local, territorial and tribal governments and educational systems whose cybersecurity needs are just as great. It is easy to say, “Never trust – always verify.” It is much harder to put into practice. The National Security Agency relea...

Of all the consequential potential applications for artificial intelligence, nothing may rival its use by military operations. The very idea of life-and-death decision-making by AI-enabled weapons systems has induced fear in the collective social imagination for decades – the first “Terminator” movie was released in 1985.Hollywood’s deployment of special effects is lightyears beyond the capabilities of today’s AI....