Page 25 - Federal Computer Week, May/June 2019

Trending
JEDI cloud deal
down to AWS
and Microsoft
An internal Defense Department investigation has concluded that the $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure procurement was not tainted by conflict of interest, but DOD did find some possible ethical violations on the part of former staffers with ties to Amazon Web Services.
“The department’s investigation has determined that there is no adverse impact on the integrity of the acquisition process,” DOD spokeswoman Elissa Smith told FCW. “However, the investigation also uncovered potential ethical violations, which have been further referred to [DOD’s inspector general].”
The probe was launched in response to a lawsuit brought by Oracle alleging conflict of interest on the part of two former AWS employees whose work for DOD touched the controversial JEDI procurement. That lawsuit was stayed in order for the DOD probe to take place. Now that it is over, DOD will seek to lift the stay. There’s no word yet on whether DOD will also seek to have Oracle’s lawsuit dismissed.
Microsoft and AWS are now the only companies vying for the JEDI contract because they meet all the requirements listed in the proposal, Smith said. Oracle and IBM, which protested the JEDI solicitation but did not join in Oracle’s lawsuit, are now officially out of the running.
The contract’s expected award date has been moved from April to mid-July at the earliest, Smith added.
— Lauren C. Williams
75
RPA bots will be running at the Defense Logistics Agency by the end of fiscal 2019
DOD mulls incentives for vendors to report vulnerabilities
There are several obstacles to the Defense Department’s goal of supply chain security, including lack of data from vendors on possible vulnerabilities.
William Stephens, counterintelli- gence director at the Defense Secu- rity Service, said operating forces should receive capabilities without “critical information and/or technology being wittingly or unwit-
tingly lost, stolen, denied, degraded or inappropri- ately given away or sold.”
the past two years, Stephens said reports have been a mix of cyber and human activity: 16 percent were cyber only, 30 percent were human only, and 54 percent had indicators of both.
“Industry does a good job” of reporting activity, he said, with 25 percent of companies making some sort of report and 15 percent reporting information of counterintelligence
“If the incentives are correct, they’ll deliver.”
DSS oversees cleared
industry partners that
work on classified projects with DOD. At a security event in April, Stephens said he wants those vendors to share potentially adverse information as early as possible, even if that means paying incentives to the companies.
DSS receives about 50,000 reports annually and investigates about 8,000 for counterintelligence purposes. For
— WILLIAM STEPHENS, DEFENSE SECURITY SERVICE
interest. But DSS needs about three times as many companies reporting for the data to be statistically significant.
“The challenge is that we’re going to have to incentivize if we’re actually going to truly get to the depth and breadth of the challenge,” he said. “If the incentives are correct, they’ll deliver.”
DISA pushes ahead with milCloud 2.0 migration
About halfway through its mandatory migration of non-military defense agencies to milCloud 2.0, the Defense Information Systems Agency is pushing forward with classified system capabilities and making sure the large “fourth estate” agencies begin migrating later this year.
The fourth estate refers to DOD headquarters and agencies and activities that do not fall under the military departments.
Caroline Bean, DISA’s milCloud deputy program manager and lead engineer, told FCW that the platform will add Secret IP Router Network Impact Level 6 for classified data this
summer. It already supports Impact Level 5 for unclassified workloads. But the main focus is preparing defense headquarters agencies, including DISA, for the migration.
The biggest challenges so far are application rationalization and helping agencies understand what they have and how to move it to milCloud.
“The migration piece is the hard part,” Bean said, adding that most agencies are in the planning phase or only beginning implementation. There are more than 2,000 workloads on the platform, but most of those agencies are “getting a feel for what milCloud 2.0 is.”
— Lauren C. Williams
— Lauren C. Williams
May/June 2019 FCW.COM 25