As the US and the world moves into the second year of fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, the application of information technology to solving health issues has never been more important. The data about where cases are appearing and the current distribution numbers for vaccines have been translated into many dashboards that are providing a window into the current state of the battle. IT has also been a critical factor in user centered design for i...

With aging IT infrastructure, outdated job classification system and a greying government workforce, agency executive and human capital officers face a trifecta of challenges in the years ahead. Soaring demand for cybersecurity experts and data scientists are just two examples of the newer professional specialists that the government is struggling to hire. With the rise of vaccinated workers, questions have arisen about the reopening of federa...

The Continuous Diagnostic and Mitigation (CDM) program has matured and broadened its offerings and full deployment of agency dashboards is on the horizon. In the last year, however, ominous high profile breaches in commercial and critical infrastructure networks have highlighted the continued importance of strong cybersecurity across federal networks. In the wake of the pandemic, federal IT managers are faced with an increasingly complex cyber...

In just a few short years, Robotic Process Automation has gone from a few scattered pilot projects to an essential tool deployed by dozens of agencies. Hundreds of thousands of staff-hours have been saved, and organizations are increasingly looking to leverage artificial intelligence to automate more-complicated workflows. Automation at scale comes with challenges, however -- from credential management to siloed systems to ensuring that outdat...

Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM) and Cybersecurity Supply Chain Risk Management (C-SCRM) have gained increased attention recently as several high profile incidents compromised a number of federal systems. In the wake of those incidents, The White House, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the National Institute for Standards and Technology have all stepped in to provide new guidance and tools for agencies to improve the...

Federal agencies must shift fully to electronic records management by December 2022, when the National Archives and Records Administration will stop accepting new paper records. Successfully making that transition entails far more than simply digitizing existing documents. Meeting the goals set by M-19-21 demands changes to current business processes, dramatically different approaches to content classification, new systems that are digital thr...

Emerging technologies have always offered the promise of better, faster, cheaper processing and problem solving, but they also bring a host of challenges with them, from security and operational issues to privacy concerns. The past year has also shown that necessity remains the mother of invention, as agencies moved to adapt technology to remote workplace models, as well as roll out new services and capabilities demanded by the pandemic. Where...

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), the government-wide plan to secure cloud products and services, is almost a decade old. It is still evolving, however. Early in 2021, the House of Representative passed a bill that would have codified a number of its provisions into law, standardizing its processes for agencies to on-ramp cloud computing technologies. To date, the Senate has not acted on the bill. At the same tim...

For federal, state and local government cybersecurity executives, the mission to detect and eliminate hackers on their expanding digital networks has always been a fluid exercise. In the last year, their work has become even more challenging. As the pandemic pushed agencies to remote work, they leaned even more on cloud computing, mobile and remote access capabilities, and the attack surface has become more diffuse and vulnerable. Sly, determi...

As agencies push their modernization and digital transformation efforts forward, they know that the foundation of the work must focus on the network level. Right before the pandemic hit, the CIO Council provided a white paper to help agencies lay out a plan for their next generation networks. It discussed how new and emerging technologies will change networks of the future and predicted increased use of 5G wireless networks and software define...