The Wrap: Digital Resilience Wake-Up Call; TMF Funding AI Safety; DoD IG Eyes CJADC2

Welcome to The Wrap for Friday, July 19!

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From the newsroom at MeriTalk, it’s the quickest read in Federal tech news. Here’s what you need to know today:

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Digital Resilience Wake-Up Call

Here’s all the news to catch up with on today’s Crowdstrike outage that hobbled Federal agencies and a wide? range of critical infrastructure around the world, and looking past today, here's the larger challenge on digital resiliency to pay attention to going forward into the recovery phase. Anne Neuberger, the White House’s deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technologies, put it this way in a discussion today at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado: “I think it highlights both the degree to which our economies, our national security are now digital and interconnected in a fundamental way.” She continued, “at this point, we believe that it is an IT-related patch, an issue with that patch, I think [CrowdStrike is] determining what went on there, but it does highlight the need for us when we are such a digitally connected country and global economy … to ensure that we have the resilience.” she said. “The irony of this morning is that a major international cybersecurity company was impacted,” Neuberger said, adding, “so we need to really think about our digital resilience – not just in the systems we run, but in the globally connected security systems, the risks of consolidation, how we deal with that consolidation, and how we ensure that if an incident does occur, it can be contained and we can recover quickly.”

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TMF Funding AI Safety

The Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) said today it approved a $10 million funding award to help the Commerce Department put some more weight behind its efforts to build the U.S. AI Safety Institute (AISI), which was conceived in November 2023 at the direction of President Biden to support the responsibilities assigned to the Department of Commerce under the administration’s landmark?AI executive order . AISI is being created by the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) component. NIST Director Laurie Locascio said the TMF money will help to build a foundation for the new institute and “allow us to speed up the development of AI testing capabilities and help us provide federal agencies with the tools they need to safely deploy AI in ways that benefit the American people.” Also winning new TMF funding today was the Department of Energy, which will use $3.8 million to improve existing?nuclear emergency response infrastructure.

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DoD IG Eyes CJADC2

The Pentagon’s Inspector General (IG) office is lining up to take a critical look at the Defense Department’s (DoD) progress to date on the Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) effort designed to develop?new technologies and strategies that provide commanders across every warfighting domain with superior information and decision-making capabilities. The IG said in a July 15 ?letter to senior officials at DoD and combatant commands that it plans to kick off the review later this month. According to the letter, the IG plans to evaluate and assess “the effectiveness with which the DoD developed and implemented the [CJADC2] line of effort to modernize mission partner information sharing.” The IG also said it may “revise the objective as the evaluation proceeds, and we will also consider suggestions from management for additional or revised objectives.”

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Army’s Zero Trust Scale Challenge

Further on the DoD front, a top U.S. Army tech official said this week that the Pentagon’s push to have zero trust strategy goals met by 2027 is easier said than done – in the Army’s case because of the sheer scale of the service branch. Mark Kitz – the Program Executive Officer for the Army’s Program Executive Office for Command, Control and Communications-Tactical – talked about the challenge during a July 18 webinar organized by GovCIO. “Our biggest challenge has been how do we protect, defend, and deliver on zero trust pillars across this diverse scale of a tactical and enterprise Army,” said Kitz. He went on to explain that implementing zero trust at the scale of the Army requires dealing with a wide range of environments – anywhere from a “battalion deploying with radios in austere networks to tens of thousands of Army families at Fort Liberty leveraging the network.”

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Once again, let’s “call IT a day,” but we'll bring you more next week. Until then please check the MeriTalk breaking news website throughout the day for the latest on government IT people, process, and policy. And finally, please hit the news tip jar [with leads, breaking news, or simply your two cents] at [email protected] .