The federal government has continued to refine current standards to better fit the needs of American people. Millions of Americans heavily rely on government-funded benefit programs to maintain their livelihoods. The stresses and burdens that come with interacting with the government, such as needing the services of Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance, Social Security, etc. need to be eliminated in order to elevate the customer experie...

After decades of delay, cybersecurity has become a defining issue for the United States. In response, when the White House laid out its zero trust requirements in January 2022, it set an ambitious goal – that all agencies have their zero trust infrastructure in place before October 1, 2024. This is because of the reality of the digital age: a persistent threat environment is the norm in the IT world, and agencies have to assume they...

Military contractors of all types are trying to work through the Department of Defense’s Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) 2.0. It has been something of a moving target, as the Department of Defense has changed the certification model from five levels in CMMC 1.0 to three in the current version, to better align with existing federal standards and cut red tape for small and mid-sized companies. But the purpose of the CMMC...

Modern cybersecurity measures such as post-quantum cryptography (PQC) and zero trust architecture (ZTA) are essential to protect U.S. critical infrastructure and ensure a resilient nation. And with a flurry of comprehensive initiatives coming from the Executive Branch, Pentagon, NSA, and NIST, it can be challenging for U.S. government CIOs and CISOs to determine where to prioritize resources. But PQC and ZTA aren’t mutually exclusive: ef...

A recent study concluded that government agencies are deploying mixed-IT environments - whether on-prem, public cloud, CSPs, MSPs, edge, colocation - at a high rate and that hybrid multicloud is projected to grow almost 5 times over the next three years. Government agencies are rethinking their cloud strategies to meet evolving priorities and mandates and how to address this complexity, especially in the face of IT staffing and skills shortage...

When the log4j vulnerability was first identified in late 2021, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency responded very rapidly, including giving all federal agencies less than a week to identify and patch all their affected systems, and coordinating a nationwide response to encourage the private sector to do the same. But the vulnerability is likely to dog agencies and the private sector alike for years. There are at least two rea...

Cyber attacks are on the increase across all levels of government – and state and local governments are often targeted because they have fewer resources for security. For instance, an October 2022 survey found that more than half of state and local governments faced ransomware attacks in 2021, and just one in five organizations successfully stopped the attack. Strengthening the security and resilience of these agencies’ systems req...

In the digital age, government agencies face increasing threats from spyware that can compromise sensitive information and undermine national security. To combat this, many government organizations are taking proactive measures by implementing executive orders and directives to ban specific applications on their mobile devices. However, this approach presents challenges in terms of scalability, visibility, and keeping up with rapidly evolving...

The universe of artificial intelligence applications is going through its own Big Bang right now. As artificial intelligence (AI) applications proliferate across the internet ecosystem, other changes are being triggered, from the commitment to R&D funding to workforce development to new initiatives in higher education. As public awareness grows of AI’s potential and how it may affect them, there still are issues to be resolved. For i...

Cyber attacks are on the increase across all levels of government – and state and local governments are often targeted because they have fewer resources for security. For instance, an October 2022 survey found that more than half of state and local governments faced ransomware attacks in 2021, and just one in five organizations successfully stopped the attack. Strengthening the security and resilience of these agencies’ systems req...