The Winvale Blog

DoD Copes With Waning Procurement Budget

2012-05-09T16:42:56+00:00

The Department of Defense (DoD) is addressing an agency-wide concern with the current use and future of GSA Schedules. DoD officials are working with the GSA to explore new options for contracting. In light of recent budget cutbacks, the looming threat of sequestration, and task forces dedicated to eliminating redundancy in procurement across the department- contracting is at the forefront of reform.

The DoD is executing a pilot program exploring the use of different types of contracts for different procurement opportunities. Currently the DoD is somewhat restricted to signing fixed priced contracts. Fixed cost contracts naturally run the risk of wasted funding and contractors not using the most cost-effective strategies. One method currently being explored within GSA Schedules for the DoD is a cost-reimbursement method. This method would require contractors to cover costs up front and provide incentives to complete a service quickly and at the lowest cost. Understandably the cost-reimbursement method would be unfeasible with many DoD contracts, but for other service oriented contracts could save the department money.

According to the DoD’s FY13 Procurement Request, Army, Navy, Air Force, and Defense wide budget lines have been reduced by $544 million, $791 million, $794 million, and $927 million respectively. Regardless of the potential for further cuts from sequestration, the DoD is proactively engaging in acquisition reform to survive these procurement cuts.

Acquisition reform at the DoD is proving especially challenging in the face of new technology. The antiquated acquisition model prevents the department from getting services quickly. As technology moves at the speed of light, the DoD acquisition model operates at a snail’s pace, but the coming months will be crucial for contractors as the department embarks on reform and even making procurement process automated.

Human Resources IT Movement Improves Business Processes

2012-05-01T20:36:15+00:00

Recently, a new wave of trends has emerged in the Human Resources (HR) market. Regardless of industry, HR organizations, departments, and leaders are focused on leveraging technology in new and creative ways to accurately manage and secure a tremendous amount of company and employee data while facilitating employee access to company and benefit information. As a result, they are turning to their internal IT departments for help streamlining and automating their complex human resource business processes. These technologies are showing improved process adherence and policy compliance, as well as increased employee satisfaction while reducing workload.

To effectively automate Human Resources organizations’ business processes, many HR departments leverage flexible workflow automation, enforced approvals, a robust knowledgebase and user self-service capabilities of IT service desk tools. These tools can:

Easily request, track and manage contractor and temporary employees
Control employee moves, adds and changes
Streamline benefits enrollment and ongoing benefits management
Centrally document time-off request and approvals
Track employee training and certification

Integrating and automating the workflow associated with Human Resource business processes can help improve communication between distributed departments that often rely on information from Human Resources. If you or your organization is in the HR industry, it’s a trend to seriously consider in order to stay ahead of the market.

Steady Rise in Spending on Multiple-Award Contracts

2012-04-27T20:19:05+00:00

A recent Bloomberg Government study reminds us that Federal Government spending on multiple-award contracts (MACs) rose 49 percent to $121 billion over the last four years, more than double the growth rate of all other contracting programs within the Federal Government.

These contracts often go overlooked outside the federal contracting community, but are intended to reduce costs by simplifying the procurement process for agencies in the federal space. Agencies (such as the DoD) will hold competitions to pick multiple suppliers, as opposed to one single provider. Once chosen for the pool, these contractors will bid against each other for orders as specific needs come up.

The rapid growth of multiple-award contracts has raised the stakes for the largest of Government suppliers. Prime contractors know it is the opportunity for millions or billions in revenue for the term of the agreement, which is frequently five years or even longer.

To top it all off, the Government’s fiscal 2010 spending on MACs was 33 percent more than the Government Accountability Office’s estimate of $91 billion, according to the Bloomberg study. Revenue rose to $121 billion in fiscal year 2010 from $81 billion in fiscal year 2006.

Officials are taking notice and putting new measures in place to oversee Multiple-Award Contracts. President Barack Obama’s top acquisition official recently ordered more oversight of agencies seeking to set up new MACs in the future.

Defense Industrial Base Program Expansion

2012-04-23T22:04:34+00:00

Over the past year the Department of Defense (DOD) has been conducting the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) pilot program which increased the amount of classified and unclassified information flowing between the DOD and private industry. The pilot included 17 defense companies and internet carriers AT&T, Verizon and CenturyLink.

In recent years, foreign hackers have had more success stealing information from systems owned and operated by companies in the defense industrial base. Lockheed Martin is among the companies included in the pilot program, which several years ago had terabytes of data related to the Pentagon’s Joint Strike Fighter project stolen from its networks.

The program utilizes NSA signatures to filter incoming e-mails which, due to the small number of false-positives, has been considered a success. However, the program has been less effective at redirecting outbound traffic headed for bad web sites.

Rep. James R. Langevin (D-R.I.), co-founder of the Congressional Cybersecurity Caucus, commented on the programs need for a more complete solution, “Signature-based defenses alone will never be enough to secure our critical infrastructure. We need a comprehensive approach that incorporates innovative information sharing with industry, while holding them accountable for stronger security.”

Although the program has had mixed results, defense officials are pushing to get approval from the Office of Management and Budget to expand the program to include roughly 200 firms. Moving forward the program will include a broader sample of companies and more comprehensive set of signatures.

Progress in FedRAMP Cloud Initiative

2012-04-17T18:34:55+00:00

David McClure, Associate Administrator at GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies, announced at the AFFIRM event on April 13^th that the third party assessment organizations (3PAOs) will be announced in May 2012.

This is a major step for FedRAMP, which will start the process for cloud service providers to obtain the provisional authorizations. These 3PAOs are an important part of the FedRAMP process, because they will be validating the cyber security control requirements for service providers. While the review is being handled mainly by DHS and GSA, the entire Joint Authorization Board (JAB) will have the final say on who will be a 3PAO. The JAB consists of the Chief Information Officers from GSA, DHS, and DOD. Department of Homeland Security Chief Information Officer, Richard Spires, said that once the 3PAO’s are picked in May, he expects the program to take-off in June of this year.

While FedRAMP will mandate the minimum level of security requirements, Casey Coleman, GSA Chief Information Officer, wanted to clarify that even with the FedRAMP program, meeting FISMA security requirements is still mandatory. With the FedRAMP program starting to pick-up speed, this is a good sign that the government cloud computing era is upon us.

England College First to Use Location Technology to Increase Visibility of Students

2012-04-09T13:31:44+00:00

West Cheshire College, a leading vocational college in the northwest part of England, is the first college to implement a real time location tracking solution. This technology will enable West Cheshire to precisely track, analyze and manage student movements around the buildings’ free flowing public and learning zones. The variety of data being received via real time reporting will allow the college to see which students are in class at any given time. The college can act on this data based on student movement patterns within the building to efficiently allocate resources and optimize staff and resourcing capacity.

The data provided from the system is also used to improve the operating efficiency of other systems through classroom occupancy management. This allows the college to ensure appropriate government funding by accurately recording and reporting enrollment and attendance. In the future the college hopes to connect attendance information to systems such as cooling, heating, and lighting to increase efficiencies and reduce operating costs.

Big Data Equals Big Opportunities

2012-04-04T20:25:12+00:00

This week the Obama administration put out a new initiative for Big Data. Six agencies (DoD, DoE, DARPA, NIH, NSF, and USGS) have dedicated over $200 million to ensure this is a successful program. John Holdren, assistant to the president, stated that many more agencies will be involved in the future. NASA and NOAA will be the next agencies to enter the big data push. These are especially important because of the quantity of data they both collect. The government plans to close over 450 data centers nation wide. This will require data centers to be more robust in all aspects. This incluudes server’s space availability to meeting all cyber security standards. With fewer data centers the new data centers will store and process larger amounts of data. This will also allow for agencies to have better communication and be more efficient in their efforts.

This new push for big data asks one very important question: “The challenge is, what do we do with all the data we are using?” which was originally asked by GSA’s Dave McClure. Subra Suresh, director of NSF outlined six specific areas that her agency is working on moving to big data. DoD is betting big on big data and is investing $250 million annually across all military branches. The big data initiative will increase cooperation and collaboration among agencies and can truly unlock the power of big data.

Additionally, another report was released this week from the Obama administration highlighting ongoing federal programs that are addressing the challenges of big data. To track the future of big data visit Data.gov

Next on the Horizon for FedGov - Mobile Device Expansion

2012-03-19T18:46:04+00:00

"People desire to use their consumer devices to access their corporate networks," Troy Lange, NSA's mobility mission manager, said in an interview. "This is about bringing efficiencies and capabilities that people are used to in their everyday lives and extending that to our national security mission.

"So what now? The next crucial step for Federal agencies to expand mobile device usage within their network will be increased recognition of cloud mandates. This will reference IT Security and what the cloud specifically means to each individual agency’s environment.

Key players like Microsoft/Windows are acknowledging this trend and preparing for the band wagon of end-users to follow. They are doing with by strategically crafting their latest OS version to include more functionality within the mobile device/tablet piece .

A great example is Windows Server 8, which is tailored around tablet functionality. The latest direction for Government entities of administering mobile device management and change management in the world of Federal IT /Security frameworks appears to be multi-tiered and coldly- welcomed by some officials.This may be due to the common concerns around fees, maintenance, risk management, total cost of ownership and most importantly from an operations perspective, Return on Investment (ROI).

Traditionally there has been somewhat of a larger delta between the needs of IT and Business Operations. Since 2002 Winvale consistently counters these stigmas by offering low-risk, high value, software-as-a-service (Saas) solutions to the Government.

Technological trends in 2011 and 2012 have shown the US Government’s objectives in this regard refered to as the Federal Mobility Strategy.

With intentions of providing instrumental support to Agencies planning to address the cloud or Security pieces within their IT Infrastructure in 2012, Winvale has evolved a wheelhouse of Federal Government Solutions. These solutions suffice the most immediate Agency needs with regard to Cyber Security, Public and Private Cloud, Mobile Device Management as well as Identity Management.

Government organizations cannot afford to expose confidential data to the public. They also need access to Federally compliant tools and solutions that support both Business and IT Operations. This is what will provide true collaboration capabilities within the cloud. For more information on Winvale’s SaaS solutions, click here.

Federal Government Prepares to Launch FedRAMP Initiative

2012-03-09T17:17:19+00:00

FedRAMP (Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program) is led by GSA and is a soon-to-be mandatory government wide program that standardizes the government’s approach to authorizing cloud services for use by federal agencies and monitoring those services to ensure that they continue to meet federal cybersecurity requirements.Once a service goes through the initial FedRAMP authorization process, it will get a stamp of approval that all agencies can use to sign off on the service’s ability to meet federal security requirements.

FedRAMP is still in pre-launch stage. The launch of its initial operational capabilities is scheduled for June 2012, and the focus will be on infrastructure as a service and e-mail as service. Full operational capabilities are scheduled for the second quarter of fiscal 2013. At this stage, FedRamp will include more diverse products and services. By 2014 the government will move to full implementation with on-demand scalability and all federal agencies will be required to use the FedRAMP process for assessments.

The FedRAMP process will greatly increase efficiency across IT departments in the federal government. The “approved for one, approved for all” model will prevent agencies from having to spend money, time, and other resources on approving every single IT application which may have already been approved elsewhere. We have seen system certification and authorization reciprocity within the DoD for some time now. It is only fitting that we see this type of collaboration spread throughout the entire federal government. In this era of shrinking budgets FedRAMP hits the nail on the head in two areas; cutting costs in the approval process and getting agencies to focus on the cloud!

Securing the cloud through Identity Management

2012-03-06T18:51:21+00:00

Identity management solutions safely guard and control user identities and privileges. Single Sign-On (SSO) enables organizations to provide authorized user access to systems and services providing efficient management of the entire identity lifecycle. This includes assessing, planning, implementing, auditing, and maintaining identities and access privileges. Government agencies are taking an aggressive stance of migrating to the cloud which promises to reduce the cost of delivering government services in this fiscally conservative environment. Cloud Identity management plays a central role in securing cloud deployments.

With the growing migration to the Cloud, government agencies are facing new challenges in cyber security and working hard to address these deficiencies. Personal Identity Verification (PIV) cards are being issued in increasing numbers; the Federal Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) hasconnected agency and commercial PKIs via a trusted framework; and working groups are tackling relevant questions in agency- and mission-specific situations. Identity, Credential, and Access Management (ICAM) is the Executive Branch Implementation of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC or Strategy). NSTIC charts a course for public and private sectors to collaborate. They raise the level of trust associated with the identities of individuals, organizations, networks, services, and devices involved in online transactions. The NSTIC’s vision is that individuals and organizations will utilize efficient, user-friendly and interoperable identity solutions. This will allow them to access online services in a manner that promotes confidence, privacy, choice, and innovation.