FCW Insider: Feb. 22

After a scathing internal evaluation, the Defense Information Systems Agency said it is working to resolve latency and reliability issues in the Joint Regional Security Stacks program. Lauren C. Williams has the story.

Centralization can be stifling, but silos aren't sustainable. So now what? FCW gathered IT leaders from across government to tackle big questions about innovation. Troy K. Schneider has more.

Congress wants to know more about how the Department of Homeland Security and state and local partners use cell-site simulators – aka Stingrays -- and whether they are complying with existing regulations. Derek B. Johnson explains.

The facial recognition system widely deployed at U.S. airports is identifying alleged imposters at southern border crossings as well. Mark Rockwell reports.

Quick Hits

*** The Army is taking on a "no new money" approach when it comes to IT, and thinks category management can help.

The Army's primary IT budget goal is to better track and spend money it already has, Army Deputy CIO Gregory Garcia said at FCW's Feb 21 Cloud Security event in Washington, D.C.

Army CIO Lt. Gen. Bruce Crawford and Army Cyber Command head Lt. Gen. Stephen Fogarty will act as category managers to champion that approach.

Garcia said the Army has gotten some insight from the Reform Management Group process that identifies where IT spending occurs rather than where it is programmed. Ultimately, the Army aims to see, assess, redirect and control IT spending in all programs to get a sense of the whole enterprise. 

"People program IT spend, and then the real world happens and they spend IT spend," Garcia said. "So we're going to see what was the plan, what was the actual expenditure patterns based on expenditure data, and dig in on where we can make those greater savings."

***The General Services Administration announced a FITARA-friendly acquisition agreement with Dell EMC for the company's virtual computing environment solutions. The agency said in a Feb. 21 statement that Dell EMC's VCE solutions, which are available through Schedule 70, address many aspects of the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative.

*** Congress wants to know if white-hat hackers could probe election infrastructure for vulnerabilities. In the explanatory statement on the funding bill passed last week, Congress directed the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency to brief lawmakers by May 16 on the feasibility of a pilot program to let security researchers test election systems. Participation on the part of state and local officials would be voluntary.