Page 8 - FCW, November, December 2018

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JEDI leaves room for other clouds
The Defense Department’s massive Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract leaves room for smaller projects, said Maj. Gen. Garrett Yee, the Army’s acting deputy CIO.
He said the $10 billion single-source cloud contract does not eliminate the opportunity for the military services to experiment with other commercial cloud deployments.
26%
of agency domains had not published DMARC records by the Oct. 16 deadline
FAA drone tracker now in use nationwide
8
November/December 2018 FCW.COM
Garrett Yee
Edward Siomacco
The final installment of the Federal Aviation Administration’s drone flight authorization system is live, making the capabilities available nationwide.
In September, FAA officials announced that they had turned on the Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability (LAANC) in the central and northern U.S.
The agency has been releasing LAANC to its operating regions since a beta test earlier this year. Acting FAA Administrator Dan Elwell said the capabilities now cover all 288 air traffic control facilities, which serve 470 airports across the country.
Earlier this year, Elwell said the FAA would expand LAANC nationwide by September to help address the increasing numbers of private drones. Under FAA regulations, operators who fly unmanned aircraft at altitudes below 400 feet in airspace managed by an air traffic control facility must receive formal permission before conducting such operations.
LAANC provides near-real-time processing of authorizations for drone operators and a detailed traffic picture of the controlled space. The services are based on a public/private partnership between FAA and industry.
The system is part of the agency’s UAS Data Exchange, which aims to
facilitate drone registration and help speed integration of unmanned aircraft into the airspace used by commercial and private manned aircraft.
The system’s nationwide coverage was temporarily trimmed by Hurricane Florence. The day after the LAANC announcement, the FAA turned off the capability at Fayetteville, Florence, Wilmington and Jacksonville airports in North Carolina and at Myrtle Beach in South Carolina.
The FAA also warned drone operators that it had restricted drones involved in recovery efforts to altitudes below 200 feet to keep them out of the way of manned aircraft. In addition, private drone operators faced steep fines for flying in disaster areas without authorization.
— Mark Rockwell
Amazon and Microsoft had signaled their intention to bid on the JEDI project, but Oracle filed a pre-award protest alleging that the solicitation is purpose-built for a single vendor. IBM plans to bid on the contract but is also filing a pre-award protest and hoping to induce DOD to rewrite the solicitation to allow for multiple cloud solutions.
In remarks at an event in October, Yee said JEDI is meant to focus DOD’s attention on moving to the commercial cloud in an organized way.
At the same event, Edward Siomacco, deputy director of the Army’s Enterprise Systems Operations Directorate, said the Army Business Council has begun a commercial cloud pilot project to shift some enterprise resource planning systems to the hosting environment.
The goal of the six-month trial is to see how ERP systems for finance might be hosted in “an affordable environment,” he added.
Yee said that kind of pilot effort does not conflict with JEDI’s larger goal of moving DOD’s warfighting functions to a commercial cloud environment.
— Mark Rockwell
Jennifer Pahlka
@pahlkadot
More on the IT issues that made the family separation crisis worse from @FCWnow. http://bit.ly/2ODdJhu Relevant to my @voxdotcom piece.
1:49 PM - 3 Oct 2018
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