Over the past year the Department of Defense (DOD) has been conducting the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) pilot program which increased the amount of classified and unclassified information flowing between the DOD and private industry. The pilot included 17 defense companies and internet carriers AT&T, Verizon and CenturyLink.

David McClure, Associate Administrator at GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies, announced at the AFFIRM event on April 13th that the third party assessment organizations (3PAOs) will be announced in May 2012. This is a major step for FedRAMP, which will start the process for cloud service providers to obtain the provisional authorizations. These 3PAOs are an important part of the FedRAMP process, because they will be validating the cyber security control requirements for service providers. While the review is being handled mainly by DHS and GSA, the entire Joint Authorization Board (JAB) will have the final say on who will be a 3PAO. The JAB consists of the Chief Information Officers from GSA, DHS, and DOD. Department of Homeland Security Chief Information Officer, Richard Spires, said that once the 3PAO’s are picked in May, he expects the program to take-off in June of this year.

This week the Obama administration put out a new initiative for Big Data. Six agencies (DoD, DoE, DARPA, NIH, NSF, and USGS) have dedicated over $200 million to ensure this is a successful program. John Holdren, assistant to the president, stated that many more agencies will be involved in the future. NASA and NOAA will be the next agencies to enter the big data push. These are especially important because of the quantity of data they both collect. The government plans to close over 450 data centers nation wide. This will require data centers to be more robust in all aspects. This incluudes server’s space availability to meeting all cyber security standards. With fewer data centers the new data centers will store and process larger amounts of data. This will also allow for agencies to have better communication and be more efficient in their efforts.

"People desire to use their consumer devices to access their corporate networks," Troy Lange, NSA's mobility mission manager, said in an interview. "This is about bringing efficiencies and capabilities that people are used to in their everyday lives and extending that to our national security mission.

Identity management solutions safely guard and control user identities and privileges. Single Sign-On (SSO) enables organizations to provide authorized user access to systems and services providing efficient management of the entire identity lifecycle. This includes assessing, planning, implementing, auditing, and maintaining identities and access privileges. Government agencies are taking an aggressive stance of migrating to the cloud which promises to reduce the cost of delivering government services in this fiscally conservative environment. Cloud Identity management plays a central role in securing cloud deployments.

Reports have surfaced this month indicating that government officials will soon be able to receive classified materials through smartphones. The phones will operate using a specially designed version of Android software, which is being developed alongside Google as part of a multi-agency project that contractors have been hearing rumors of for the past year.