The Wrap: JWICS Going Cloud; Fed Software Bills; Tech in the Wild

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

JWICS Going Cloud

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) is doing a major upgrade of the Federal government’s 30-year-old top-secret network, with cloud services playing a major factor in the modernization effort, said Johanna Leasiolagi, a senior tech advisor at DIA, at a Federal News Network event on March 23. Delivering a modernized architecture of the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communication System (JWICS) is a major priority for 2023, and she said multi-award cloud contracts – like the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contracts and the intelligence community’s (IC) Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) contracts – will push that effort forward. JWICS began its life in the 1990s as a way to run video meetings between DIA and the Pentagon and has since grown to hold the DoD’s and the IC’s most confidential intelligence information.

Fed Software Bills

Bipartisan?legislation?that aims to improve management of how the Federal government purchases and uses software was reintroduced in the both the Senate and the House this week. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Gary Peters, D-Mich., and Bill Cassidy, R-La., are trying again to get agencies to deal with the long-standing challenge of buying duplicative software with the Strengthening Agency Management and Oversight of Software Assets Act. The bill would require Congress, the Office of Management and Budget, and the General Services Administration to conduct an independent, comprehensive assessment of their software licensing practices in order to increase Federal oversight of software contracts, streamline operations, and reduce wasteful spending. A House companion bill was introduced by Rep. Matt Cartwright, D-Pa. Lawmakers said the latest bill would build on the success of the 2016 MEGABYTE Act, which they said has saved $450 million since then by reducing duplicative software purchases.

Tech in the Wild

The U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) is pursuing a multi-cloud hybrid strategy that gives users greater choices, changes the portion of computing that remains on-premise, and most importantly enables mission success in “austere” locations where broadband doesn’t enable reach-back to commercial clouds. Mark Taylor, USSOCOM’s chief technical officer put it this way: “We’re normally not operating missions in Malibu or Times Square or someplace nice. We’re normally doing it in some part of the world that’s not necessarily hospitable.” He said he is working to give the command’s activities a choice of cloud service options, and said that having only vendor is just no longer a realistic strategy.

GAO Prods CISA

In a new?report, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is asking the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to develop time frames on when it will complete its work in helping sector risk management agencies (SRMAs) to implement their fiscal year (FY) 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) responsibilities. CISA’s to-do list is more than a couple of years old, but lacks a timeline to finish. What’s getting in the way? GAO says CISA “has prioritized defining its own role as national coordinator.” Tina Won Sherman, a director in GAO’s Homeland Security and Justice team, told a House Homeland Security subcommittee this week: “We attempted to try to get an understanding and spoke with all of the sector risk management agencies to understand exactly what their maturity levels are and the extent to which they’ve been effective in their roles … But CISA doesn’t have a very good handle on what that looks like, and in fact, we heard that directly also from those agencies themselves.”

Hill Eager for NCS Action Plan

House Oversight and Accountability Committee members are eager to hear more about implementation plans for the Biden administration’s National Cybersecurity Strategy (NCS)?released?by the White House earlier this month, but Acting National Cyber Director Kemba Walden counseled patience while the NCD and other agencies keep working on the implementation steps. Walden did not offer a timeline, but assured lawmakers that NCD has “already started the work,” and has “created an implementation plan working group” with other Federal agencies. The NCD is also working with the Office of Personnel Management on a national cyber workforce and education strategy – one of four pillars in the NCS.

Once again, let’s “call IT a day,” but we'll bring you more on Monday. Until then please check the MeriTalk breaking news website?throughout the day?for the latest on government IT people, process, and policy.

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