The General Services Administration (GSA) has recently developed a social media site, GSA Interact, with the goal of helping the GSA understand how to better provide acquisition products and services. While this interactive website offers vendors many new tools, from training opportunities to blogging questions, one of the more prominent features is the new Contractor Teaming Arrangements Tool (CTAT). CTAT provides GSA Schedule holders with a forum to facilitate teaming arrangements. This forum allows members to communicate their teaming needs to a broad audience of GSA Schedule holders, while allowing those viewing the opportunities to reach out and generate partnerships.

Efficacious mobile device management is important in most fields, but when you are out on the enemy lines and need to communicate with your fellow law enforcement officer for back-up or need to shield top-secret information from falling into the hands of the enemy it is absolutely vital. This is why the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded Invicea, a cyber-security firm, with a multi-year $21.4 million contract to heighten the security apparatuses on Google’s Android operating system, announced on June 25th. This contract is an extension of the “Mobile Armour” project, which is striving to attain topnotch security structures on all smartphones used by the army. Invicea is currently experimenting with over 3,000 Android phones and tablets in Afghanistan. The exact modifications that are going to be made are not clear yet, but Anup Ghosh, the founder and CEO of Invicea and former DARPA program manager, told SecurityWeek that they will team up with other firms and universities to put encryption, application control and similar enhancements into Mobile Armour. They stated that their goals are to isolate hazardous apps and to develop a system that can detect and diminish cyber-attacks from these apps.

Los Alamos National Laboratory is one of the largest science and technology multidisciplinary research institutions in the world. In anticipation of a large federal migration to a virtualized cloud environment, Los Alamos Lab built a sophisticated cloud platform which is now serving as a model for how data center managers should charge and entice users.

Government agencies squander for years completing their gargantuan IT projects with their contractors, but often they take such extensive amounts of time to arrive on the scene that when they do the need for them is minimal or even nonexistent. During this inefficient and exhaustive process, billions of dollars are wasted and the government does not get the full benefit of their IT innovation. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) developed a guide book, released June 14, 2012, about module contracting that maps out methods of more efficacious project planning in a variety of aspects from investment manageability to responsiveness of the contracts in Contracting Guidance to Support Modular IT Development.

n a recent mobile strategy document released by the Department of Defense (DoD), they addressed the need to strengthen the efficiency of its workforce and operations and construct its business to be more relatable to today’s modern workplace and clientele. The document went on to explain this implementation would involve addressing 3 major goals for the department; “Advance and evolve the DoD Information Enterprise infrastructure to support mobile devices, institute mobile device policies and standards, and promote the development and use of DoD mobile and web-enabled applications.” This strategy “identifies the vision and goals for capitalizing on the full potential of mobile devices and supports the end-user services approach in DoD Information Technology Enterprise Strategy and Roadmap,” states Chief Information Officer, Teri Takai. In order to evolve into this developing strategy, the Department has stated that it must better familiarize itself with management methods of better utilizing available spectrum and also “develop mechanisms for rapidly transitioning technologies into programs of record.” DoD’s new enterprise infrastructure and wireless networks must have the capability to support both unclassified and classified high-bandwidth traffic, a critical up kept stream of wireless coverage to in-building and terrestrial locations, and also various networking architectures. This architecture must maintain a security between the interface of DoD networks and commercial networks by empowering a proper management of mobile devices, applications, and network connections.

Claims are now being made that millions of dollars in savings opportunities are open to the General Service Administration (GSA) by The Office of Inspector General (OIG). In their Semiannual Report to the Congress, released May 31, they stated there are multitude of ways in which money could be recovered by the GSA in focus areas such as acquisition programs, civil recoveries, and criminal investigations.