NIST asks for advice on cybersecurity

The Federal Headlines is a daily compilation of the stories you hear discussed on  Federal Drive with Tom Temin. 

• Have you experienced cybersecurity problems in the digital economy? The National Institute of Standards and Technology wants to hear from you. Its Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity published a Request for Information looking for feedback from citizens, organizations and agencies on ways to strengthen cybersecurity in the public and private sectors. (Federal Register)

• There’s been a noticeable cyber culture change among the Defense Department’s service commanders. The department has been gathering service chief information officers to explain their cyber grades to DoD CIO Terry Halvorsen once a week and the Pentagon says those meetings are bringing better results. Halverson recently called on the services to work on 10 basic cyber skills as part of its Cybersecurity Implementation Discipline Plan. (Federal News Radio)

• The Army has shut down more than 400 centers since the start of the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative in 2010, but officials say most of those have been easy pickings, including small rooms of five servers or less. In addition, the reductions have steadily fallen off in the past two years. A new directive, expected to be signed by Army Secretary Eric Fanning in the next few days, will tell local officials which data centers must be closed between now and 2025. It will also create a new council of generals and senior executives to ensure the Army follows through. (Federal News Radio)

• Energy conservation is big business for the Army. Secretary Eric Fanning said the branch’s 127 energy-saving projects with the private sector now exceed $1 billion in investments. Fanning said the large amount of projects were in response to President Barack Obama’s 2011 challenge to agencies to collectively execute $4 billion in projects by the end of 2016. He said the Army’s projects alone represent 33 percent of all the federal government’s current contributions to meeting the President’s goal. (Army)

• The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in the Treasury Department is moving its email to the cloud. OCC awarded Unisys a five-year, $11.2 million contract to help move all 4,000 agency employees to Microsoft email services. Under the new contract, OCC employees will receive between 5 gigabytes and 16 gigabytes of storage. The new email service also will support up to 6,000 mobile devices as OCC is moving off Blackberrys and to Apple and Android devices. OCC issued the RFP in September 2015. (Unisys)

• The Defense Information Systems Agency is expanding the budget and scope of its latest government-operated MilCloud service. The budget for MilCloud 2.0 is growing from roughly $90 million to nearly $500 million, and tripling in contract time. John Hale, chief of DISA’s cloud portfolio, said the expansion reflects vendor feedback and Defense Department directives.  (Federal News Radio)

• The Coalition for Government Procurement wrote a letter to the General Services Administration’s Senior Procurement Executive Jeff Koses asking questions, and strongly encouraging the agency to delay the the new Transactional Data Reporting program until January 2017 rather than this fall. The coalition’s biggest concerns are about the expectations of GSA’s IG and how they will evaluate vendors. It’s asking for more time to clarify how vendors will participate in the pilot and how GSA will evaluate the new program. (Federal News Radio)

• The Internal Revenue Service’s process for making sure the contractors it hires don’t have unpaid federal tax debts is not effective enough. A recently released audit from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration said in 29 percent of the contract awards it investigated, it could find no evidence the contracting officer performed the required tax check on the winning bidders. (Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration)

• The Census Bureau faces questions from Congress over readiness for the 2020 decennial count. Bipartisan leaders of the House oversight and Senate government operations committees want to know how the bureau is doing in testing the technology it plans to use for the 2020 count. Census is supposed to have devices and software on hand this November and begin year-long testing next August. The members asked the Government Accountability Office to see if Census is on schedule. (House Oversight and Government Reform Committee)

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