Page 19 - FCW, June 2017

Commentary|MARK AMTOWER
MARK AMTOWER is the author of “Selling to the Government” and consults with industry on marketing to the federal government.
Giving agencies access to insider-threat solutions
Thanks to GWACs and the competition among large and small businesses, the government has a number of options for tackling such threats
Stories about insider threats pop
up with alarming frequency. When
I searched on that term on FCW. com, there were 1,000-plus results, including several articles in the past couple of weeks. The problem is so prevalent that the General Services Administration issued a Schedule 70 special item number for products and services under the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program GSA manages with the Department of Homeland Security.
Bloomberg Government recently issued a study that pegged CDM as a $1 billion opportunity for contrac- tors and listed top providers and the contracts being used. Although that study focuses on the industry perspective, it contains valuable insights for government.
With IT departments under constant pressure on several cyber fronts, federal IT managers often need quick access to the best solutions to combat each threat. The Bloomberg study shows the preferred contract vehicles for acquiring CDM tools and services, and they are often governmentwide acquisition contracts — especially NASA’s Solutions for Enterprise- wide Procurement — or other indefinite-delivery, indefinite- quantity contracts.
Other vehicles include the GSA/ DHS CDM contract; GSA’s Schedule 70 and 8(a) STARS, DHS’ First- Source II and Enterprise Acquisi- tion Gateway for Leading-Edge Solutions II, the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Transformation
Twenty-One Total Technology, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Enterprise System Devel- opment, and the National Institutes of Health IT Acquisition and Assess- ment Center’s CIO-SP3.
The Bloomberg study covers
the period of 2012 to 2016, and although the usual large contractors
GWACs are growing in popularity due to several factors, including the intense vetting process to win a coveted prime- contractor spot.
— Booz Allen Hamilton, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others — are on the leader list, small-business contractor Sword and Shield led the CDM vendors by posting over $531 million in CDM-related sales to the federal government in that five-year period. And 99 percent of Sword and Shield’s CDM-related sales went through NASA’s SEWP.
On the firm’s blog, Sword and Shield Federal Vice President Ray- mond Kahre wrote that “whether
by accident, negligence or ill intent, insider threats present a real dan- ger to federal agencies, and bat- tling them requires an intentional approach. At Sword and Shield Fed-
eral, we partner with government and industry to design and imple- ment the right solutions to minimize the risk that insider threats pose to agencies.”
I asked Kahre about the insider threat offering, and he said the firm looks at enterprise security and puts together solutions based on the best products for each specific problem area.
He also pointed out that Sword and Shield, now 20 years old, does nothing but enterprise security for both the public and private sectors, and the firm has been on the SEWP contract since SEWP III. More recently, the company also began selling through NITAAC’s CIO-CS vehicle.
GWACs are growing in popular- ity due to several factors, including the intense vetting process to win a coveted prime-contractor spot, the ease of use for agencies when it comes to purchasing, the lower fees associated with some of the contracts and the rapid turnaround time. SEWP, NITAAC’s contracts and GSA’s Alliant all work hard at being the least expensive and easi- est places to buy.
Two things about the Bloomberg study really got my attention: the growing use of GWACs to address security threats and the fact that
a small company like Sword and Shield competes head-to-head with larger suppliers and comes out on top. As agencies look for security solutions, they would do well to shop around. n
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