John Allison

This could be huge! Everyone on the software/AI side of DefenseTech should respond to this RFI for the Army's planned Fast Track MATOC for PEO IEW&S. Don't know what these acronyms mean or how they work? Message me! #AI #Governmentcontracts #defensetech

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Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), emphasized the importance of maintaining communication capabilities during times of conflict. In an upcoming five-year strategy, DISA focuses on providing resilient communication and command systems for warfighters at all levels. The strategy aims to ensure that critical leaders, including the President, Secretary of Defense, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, can stay connected during major wars. DISA's role also involves enhancing cybersecurity measures and coordinating intelligence analysis to address threats effectively. The agency is actively working on modernization efforts, including replacing outdated technology and accelerating cloud adoption. Lt. Gen. Skinner called for application rationalization support from industry partners to facilitate the transition to the cloud. #DISA #DefenseInformationSystemsAgency #CommunicationStrategies #WartimeComs #ResilientNetworks #Cybersecurity #CloudComputing #DefenseTechnology #MilitaryCommunications #LinkedIn #BreakingDefense

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Another big win for Shift5. BAH knows the value that Shift5's "full take" data capture and analysis brings for both cyber security and conditions based maintenance.

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Brand recognition is a critical part of company awareness. A great example I just experience this week from Robert 🦄 Slaughter and the team over at Defense Unicorns. While helping a partner implement kubernetes at the edge (middle of the ocean where k8s belongs right?) we were evaluating Zarf (https://zarf.dev/). I recognized their mascot and immediately knew that the Defense Unicorns were behind it. This is a testament to the efforts that they put in their brand and mascot, not to mention the solution is open source tool is pretty awesome. Measuring brand recognition isn't easy....my feedback is, it's working! Keep up the good work folks.

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The Pentagon's new ATO guidance is set to speed up IT modernization by making the approval process clear and quick, a big plus for tech companies working with the DOD. Shoot us an email at [email protected] to see how we can help your company adjust smoothly to these changes. Check out our insights: https://buff.ly/47BKJgo. #DevOps #AI #expertsatyourservice #businessstrategy #Strategicexcellence #Corporateadvisory

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The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is looking to "retool" its Stratus private cloud offering to better meet the needs of its mission partners. DISA's Stratus private cloud offers a multi-tenant, self-service management capability for compute, storage, and network infrastructure. However, as more DOD components turn to public cloud offerings like the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), DISA is exploring ways to enhance Stratus to provide better performance, security, and supportability for certain workloads. According to DISA's acting director of the Hosting and Compute Center, Jeff Marshall, some mission partners may require specialized features or higher levels of support that public cloud providers can't easily offer. In these cases, a private cloud like Stratus can provide a better fit, with the added benefit of more control and customization. By "retooling" Stratus, DISA aims to give its mission partners more flexibility in choosing the right cloud environment for their specific needs, whether that's public, private, or a hybrid approach. This move aligns with the Pentagon's broader cloud strategy and ensures that DOD components have access to the most suitable cloud services to support their critical missions. #DISA #Stratus #PrivateCloud #CloudStrategy #MissionSupport #CloudServices #DODModernization

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A friendly reminder of the upcoming INCOSE Model-Based Acquisition webinar this Wed, 7/31, from 11-12 ET. Details and registration information below. I hope you can join us! There are many challenges to delivering the next generation of Defense systems. The complexity of systems and the constant evolution of threats requires greater agility than ever before. Budgetary constraints drive the need for predictable delivery and informed decision making, maximizing capability and availability within an affordability envelope. The increasing complexity of the environment will therefore mandate interoperability with other Defense systems and collaboration throughout the supply chain. For many Defense organizations, adopting a Model-Based approach across the acquisition lifecycle has been vital to program success and part of a dramatic transformation in terms of thinking, culture, and ways of working. In this webinar, we’ll show how a Model-Based Acquisition approach enables a step change in capability while assuring value for money and schedule predictability. Andrew Bonica

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Vendor Provided Containers - Part 4 The "Vendor Dependency Conundrum". So you do FedRAMP or DOD/IL* work and you have a POAM (Plan of Action and Milestones). For the folks who don't do Public Sector work, this is basically a list of all of your compliance violations and vulnerabilities. What happens when you have a vulnerability in a vendor provided container? Specifically for something the vendor doesn't produce or patch? Often companies will make this a "Vendor Dependency". A "Vendor Dependency" is basically saying, "we'll wait until the upstream vendor patches it". But lets be real for a moment. The choice to use the "Vendor Provided Container" is yours and yours alone. Making it a vendor dependency is passing the responsibility for something that is most definitely the responsibility of the Cloud Service Provider (the authorized service). I described in my previous posts how vendor provided containers are woefully inadequate for production use (not hardened, not stripped, missing FIPS, etc). Long story short, the burden is still on the Cloud Service Provider (or consumer of those containers) to do all of the above. So while vendor provided containers are good to get started, they shouldn't be anywhere near a production environment. Going forward we need vendors to move past creating "development" containers, because that's really all they're good for. We need a standard for containers coming from vendors and if vendors are truly pursuing their CISA pledge of Secure by Design, they would harden them and strip them according to best practices. If they want to make it easy for DOD/FedRAMP customers, they would STIG harden them, and provide them with valid FIPS libraries. In summary, don't use vendor provided containers. You need to build your own or work with a vendor that builds and hardens container images as a service. Building your own images has a real cost to it too. It's also a discipline to do it fast and do it well. Teams are not usually equipped to take this on and often haphazardly do this work.

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