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improve employee quality of life and quality of work, reducing commuting costs and time and supporting a healthy work/ life balance,” he added. “And the City of LA sees the potential long-term environmental benefits as employees telework more and reduce their carbon footprint.”
Defensive Cyber Operations Resource for Updates, Innovation and Development
U.S. Army
Tools have little use if employees can’t access them. That’s where the Army’s Defensive Cyber Operations Resource for Updates, Innovation and Development (DRUID) comes in.
The project is designed to improve how the Army’s Cyber Mission Force trains and conducts missions. DRUID is part of the Applied Cyber Technologies portfolio managed by the Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems’ Defensive Cyber Operations.
“Up until now, the Army hasn’t had
a publicly accessible developmental environment that can be used to find innovative solutions for our critical
cyber problems,” said Lt. Col. Pete Amara, product lead for Applied Cyber Technologies. “DRUID solves this legacy problem in the Army’s IT infrastructure by applying modern continuous integration processes and workflows to legacy systems and deployment models.”
DRUID allows the Army to keep a common baseline for all Defensive Cyber Operations systems. It also reduces
the need for “boots on the ground” for
certain technical repairs and streamlines the process for adding tools to the environment, thereby bringing continuity to the Army’s systems and incorporating new workflows without requiring more infrastructure.
Although still technically in development, DRUID’s functional infrastructure is helping the Army address many of its legacy IT problems, including the lack of a publicly accessible development environment designed to solve critical cybersecurity problems.
DOL IT Platform
Department of Labor
The Department of Labor’s IT platform modernization initiative is a muscular aggregation of cloud services, content management, service management, enterprise scanning and data analytics built on an enterprisewide IT backbone.
By supporting all those operations in a single place, the platform acts as the agency’s digital spine, saving money, increasing workforce efficiencies and tightening cybersecurity for crucial
IT operations, including public-facing applications.
It started as a project to consolidate almost 40 case management systems
and reduce the expense of running those systems, some of which cost over $60 million a year to operate. The initiative benefited from the commitment of top managers and money from the Technology Modernization Fund, which the department used to modernize paper-based labor certification processes.
The platform played a key role in the
department’s public and internal response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The CIO’s office moved 23 applications to the cloud-based platform and used it to launch collaborative virtual workspaces, perform Wi-Fi and network upgrades for 135 offices, and onboard over 200 new staff members nationwide.
As the pandemic progressed, the platform channeled a tidal wave of inquiries to crucial public-facing websites, including DOL.gov and Benefits.gov, and allowed those sites to scale up to handle the surge in traffic.
The department also evolved its web properties with platform-enabled content management tools, fueling the launch of sites such as Apprenticeship.gov, which matches job seekers with opportunities to prepare for highly skilled careers, and a single source of information on H-2A and H-2B job opportunities.
DOR Nudge Notice Proof of Concept
Pennsylvania Department of Revenue
The Pennsylvania Department of Revenue (DOR) teamed up with MITRE to develop a proof of concept to test the effectiveness of nudge notices, which rely on behavioral science to get
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