DISA is working with the services to identify a mission-critical application in the cloud to ensure the additional requirements for Level-3 security are appropriate and achievable. Meanwhile, the FedRAMP program office is beginning to consider what the program will look like in two to three to five years.
Chandra McMahon, Lockheed Martin's vice president for commercial markets, discusses NSA's accreditation system that tests cybersecurity companies against 21 separate focus areas.
Former Defense Department CIO Teri Takai joins Women of Washington radio hosts Aileen Black and Gigi Schumm for a discussion on women in government roles and her predictions for the Joint Information Environment.
Robert Levinson, senior defense analyst at Bloomberg Government takes a closer look at the Pentagon's 2015 budget request, and what's in it for contractors. June 17, 2014
Selling to the Pentagon may get more difficult this summer. Director of Defense Acquisition Policy Dick Ginman wants contracting officers to consider the fees the Pentagon pays when they buy through another agency's contract. Larry Allen, president of Allen Federal Business Partners and author of the Week Ahead newsletter, writes about how to keep yourself in the running for DoD business. He tells In Depth with Francis Rose how Ginman's new memo will affect business.
A new Government Accountability Office report says the Pentagon needs more comprehensive information about potential cost savings when it considers implementing future administrative furloughs.
House Armed Services Committee Vice Chairman Mac Thornberry is in the middle of a bipartisan effort to reform defense acquisition policies. The goal is to save money and inspire new technology development in the defense industrial base. But plenty of ideas to reform DoD acquisition have floated around Washington for years. Steve Grundman is former Deputy Defense Undersecretary for Industrial Affairs and Installations and George Lund fellow at the Atlantic Council. He shared a list of principles to finally turn those ideas into action on In Depth with Francis Rose.
"Inside the DoD's Reporter's Notebook" is a biweekly feature focused on news about the Defense Department and defense community as gathered by Federal News Radio DoD Reporter Jared Serbu. In this edition, DoD kicks off its "superior supplier" program, and DoD asks Congress to stop pushing acquisition reforms.
As the Navy retakes control over its own IT networks, it is eager to introduce features that improve the experience for end users. At the same time, the Navy is warning vendors that it's not going to buy just bells and whistles. Federal News Radio's Jared Serbu reports. Read Jared's related article.
By September, the Navy anticipates it will have retaken full ownership of its main IT network after having outsourced it a decade earlier. The service says it wants to find ways to bring innovation into NMCI, but vendors will have to meet some checkpoints along the way.
The Navy has just awarded the first of what it says will be several contracts aimed toward resetting its data center consolidation efforts. As Federal News Radio's Jared Serbu reports, the service wasn't happy with the progress it was making up until now, and the new plan will lean heavily on commercial hosting providers. Read Jared's related story.
The release of the National Defense Panel's analysis of the Quadrennial Defense Review is just a few weeks away. That panel is Congress' independent review board for the QDR. Nora Bensahel is senior fellow and co-director of the Responsible Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security. She was a guest for Pentagon Solutions on In Depth with Francis Rose. Her latest work is titled "Beyond the QDR: Key Issues Facing the National Defense Panel." She says the QDR doesn't break much new ground, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
The first solicitation will address near-term fixes for the current application. The second one will look to commercial technology for a wholesale replacement of the scheduling application. VA says it will build off the contest it ran in 2013 where it awarded $3 million to competitors to develop VISTA-friendly scheduling software.
Billionaire entrepreneur and founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk, is breaking a major unwritten rule in government contracting. He's suing his customer. SpaceX is suing the Air Force after the department awarded a satellite launch contract to a joint business between Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Brett Lambert is former assistant secretary of Defense for Manufacturing and Industrial Base Policy. He spoke on In Depth with Francis Rose about how common this is within the defense contracting community.
You've heard about movie directors studying the military to make true-to-life films, but the military is also using Hollywood to prepare for battle. Active shooter situations, improvised explosive devices and car crashes are all a part of the Intensive Surgical Skills course at Strategic Operations, Inc. Backed by the Defense Department, the company has trained more than 750,000 military personnel. Navy veteran and Executive Vice President Kit Lavell joined Tom Temin and Emily Kopp on the Federal Drive to discuss the course.