Blockchain technology’s popularity has grown in recent years to full buzzword status, but government agencies are fine-tuning their use cases for the technology and picking their blockchain projects wisely, said Mark Fisk, partner in IBM Digital for Global Business Services. […]

The hype around cloud services in the Federal government could lead to substantial increases in adoption over the next year, according to new research conducted by MeriTalk. […]

CrowdStrike announced Thursday that it received an agency FedRAMP authorization which it said will allow the company “to significantly expand its footprint in the Federal government to meet demand from Federal agencies for its endpoint protection technologies.  […]

On the heels of Kelly Olson’s promotion to head the General Services Administration’s Technology and Transformation Services (TTS) organization (LINK to yesterday’s story), the agency is setting into motion a series of leadership changes impacting its FedRAMP operation, among others. […]

Zscaler announced today that its Zscaler Private Access-Government (ZPA-Government) application access platform received FedRAMP Moderate certification to sell across government. ZPA-Government, which received authority to operate by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), is the first FedRAMP-approved zero trust remote access platform. […]

During an Aug. 8 webinar on VMware Cloud on AWS hosted by the Digital Government Institute, participants said that VMware and AWS are setting up a dedicated instance of the service called VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud (US). This instance is intended to meet standards set by FedRAMP, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), and the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR). […]

Agencies have 68 days remaining to achieve compliance with the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) binding operation directive (BOD) 18-01, which requires the active enforcement of the Domain Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) protocol. […]

Security in the cloud is a shared responsibility between cloud service providers (CSPs) and government organizations. CSPs provide agencies with a secure platform to operate on, but it is the responsibility of agency security leaders to ensure the applications that are being hosted have been hardened, according to security experts. […]

Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., said today that he introduced legislation – the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Reform Act – which would codify the FedRAMP program in Federal law and address what the congressman said are shortcomings of the program, including the slow pace of implementing standardized practices and realizing efficiencies in the certification process. […]

During a General Services Administration (GSA) webinar on July 18, officials explained why Federal agencies should use GSA tools to move to the cloud, how agencies can utilize IT Schedule 70 to move to the cloud, and how to meet FedRAMP requirements. […]

Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk. […]

Matt Goodrich, FedRAMP director, and Ashley Mahan, FedRAMP evangelist, addressed industry feedback to FedRAMP’s recently released authorization boundary guidance during a webinar today. […]

When government agencies plan a secure move to the cloud, they should look to existing guidelines and regulations to protect data, and look to established solutions to ease the move, said panelists at an FCW webinar on June 21. […]

VMware and Amazon Web Services have developed a hybrid cloud solution that will make it easier and more cost-effective for Federal agencies to move mission critical workloads into public clouds such as AWS, pending FedRAMP authority to operate. […]

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is considering limiting the network damage that can result from Web browsing by having employees take it outside. […]

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) of the General Services Administration (GSA) on Wednesday announced the winners of the inaugural FedRAMP Five Awards at ATARC’s Cloud & Data Center Summit. […]

Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk. […]

A shift to the cloud offers government agencies an opportunity to embrace digital transformation, add automation, and rethink processes, said Federal IT panelists on Wednesday at MeriTalk’s 2018 Cloud Computing Brainstorm. […]

Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk. […]

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) has released new guidance to help cloud service providers (CSP) better delineate the authority and responsibility shared between providers and government agencies. […]

Federal government officials and a member of Congress influential in government IT spending debates said late last month that billions of additional savings look to be ripe for the picking through elimination of duplicative services, and that Congress is working on ways to beef up the pursuit of those savings. […]

The Defense Information Systems Agency–DISA–has granted IBM’s SmartCloud for Government a 12-month Department of Defense Provisional Authorization for systems hosting data at Impact Level 5–IL5. The move makes IBM’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service–IaaS–the latest cloud service available to Federal agencies for the highest level of unclassified information. […]

The world over, folks ask the same two questions every day–what’s for dinner, and what’s the weather forecast? In the government IT space, every day we’re all asking about the cloud forecast. A recent report from P&S Market Research provides new insights on the global government’s cloud appetites. […]

Jay Huie, Cloud Portfolio Director for GSA’s Technology Transformation Service (TTS)–which includes FedRAMP–sat down with MeriTalk last week. He offered insights on his role at GSA, FedRAMP, and the perspective on the road ahead for cloud adoption, FITARA, and MGT. […]

Google announced that Google Cloud Platform (GCP)–and Google’s underlying common infrastructure–have received the FedRAMP Rev. 4 Provisional Authorization to Operate (P-ATO) at the Moderate Impact level from the FedRAMP Joint Authorization Board (JAB). The certification covers data centers in numerous countries, so customers can take advantage of cloud services in multiple regions. […]

With compliance deadlines looming for Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), FedRAMP is ramping up its requirements for the monitoring of cloud systems. […]

Reports like December’s White House IT Modernization Report sometimes seem like they impose requirements on agencies from above. Speaking at the ServiceNow Federal Forum in February, Danielle Metz, a policy advisor at DoD Office of Science and Tech Policy and contributor to the Modernization Report, gave us a look inside the kitchen to see how these reports come together. […]

TalaTek, a risk management company, announced on Feb. 26 that it received a FedRAMP ATO from the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) for its Enterprise Compliance Management Solution (ECMS). This cloud-based SaaS allows PBGC to centralize security statistics in real time and see whether it complies with a variety of security frameworks, including NIST security frameworks.  […]

Complete Discovery Source (CDS), an eDiscovery company that finds electronic documents for litigation, announced it received a FedRAMP JAB ATO for its cloud platform on Feb. 12.  […]

Agencies undergoing digital transformation are combining on-premise, hybrid, and multiple cloud solutions into their environments. To that end, agencies need to weave cloud security and protection of on-premise systems into their broader security strategy for a true, defense-in-depth approach. […]