The Wrap: Feds Face ‘Critical’ AI Window; DoD Cooking Up OT Zero Trust; AI? Not so Fast…
Welcome to The Wrap for Tuesday, November 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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Feds Face ‘Critical’ AI Window
Federal agencies that are contemplating major moves on the AI front are facing a critical near-term window for making the technology choices necessary to carry out their aims. That’s according to Chris Smith, VP of government sales at Red Hat, who said today at the Red Hat Government Symposium?in Washington that the pace of generative AI adoption globally is prompting government to take faster action. “The decisions you make as government leaders over the next six to 12 months will likely be some of the most critical technology choices in our country’s history,” Smith said in remarks to open the symposium, which was produced by MeriTalk. “Why is that? It’s because of the accelerated pace of generative AI adoption,” he said, citing research that shows faster adoption rates of GenAI compared to early-stage adoption rates of personal computers and internet services. “Generative AI is spreading exponentially and faster than anybody could have predicted,” he said. “Just think about it – just two years after the public release of ChatGPT, 20 percent of Americans aged 18 to 64 reported using generative AI, with 28 percent using it at work already,” Smith said. “To put that in perspective, it took three years for PCs [personal computers] to get [to] 20 percent adoption rate and another 10 years to hit 40 percent,” he said, adding, “AI is here and it’s rapidly impacting.”
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DoD Cooking Up OT Zero Trust Plan
The Department of Defense (DoD) – which has poured a lot of tech resources into its plan to get the agency’s networks to zero trust security by fiscal year 2027 – is turning its cyber eye toward a similar zero trust drive for operational technology (OT), and plans to issue new guidance to that effect by next summer. That was the news today from Randy Resnick, director of DoD’s Zero Trust Portfolio Management Office (PfMO), who explained at the Red Hat Government Symposium that the department established and designed “target level zero trust” to stop an adversary – something that he said falls “in the box called IT.” But, he continued, “Recently, in the last six months, we have pivoted – not left IT, but pivoted – to now thinking about OT,” which he said “also has vulnerabilities that we are concerned about.” While the IT-focused zero trust plan continues to operate with an FY2027 deadline, Resnick said “we are going to be coming out with guidance for OT, and that’ll probably come out at the end of … summer ‘25, and we’ll have a date beyond 2027 where we start establishing ZT and OT.”
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AI? Not so Fast…
Amid all the government AI development talk, it's easy to forget that there are plenty of organizations that just aren’t ready to go there yet – and may not be for years to come – as they continue to grapple with modernizing their technology bases. Case in point: at the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for United States Attorneys (EOUSA), Alex Reber has a more basic focus: modernizing an IT system that has been running, in some instances, since the 1970s. That means a full-scale integration of AI will have to wait, Reber told attendees at the?Red Hat Government Symposium?today. “We have 94 different districts across the country, each with their own political appointees, each with their own set of judges who each have their own rules for how things need to be formatted,” said Reber, the operations manager for EOUSA’s Enterprise Application Division. “When we look into AI being able to take that information and give us meaningful results out of it, we need to clean up the underlying data, and that’s the next three to five years … we’re a long way from that.”
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Cyber Harmony House-Style
What if the Hill and the White House always worked this quickly together? Just one day after National Cyber Director (NCD) Harry Coker?urged?Congress to pass bipartisan legislation that would bolster efforts to harmonize cybersecurity regulations across the Federal government, a companion bill with that aim was introduced in the House by Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La. The House measure matches up with the ‘‘Streamlining Federal Cybersecurity Regulations Act” introduced in the Senate in July by Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich.,?and James Lankford, R-Okla., and quickly approved by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee later that month. The legislation would task the NCD to lead a committee that would aim to take action on a major item on the Biden administration’s cybersecurity policy list – examining the myriad of cybersecurity regulations on the books and trying to craft a harmonized set of rules that work better.
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Once again, let’s “call IT a day,” but we'll bring you more tomorrow. 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].