Quick Hits
***The Defense Department saved $5 billion following its Fourth Estate review last year, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said during remarks at a Jan. 24 CSIS event. That saved money, he said, will be reinvested in tech efforts including artificial intelligence, hypersonic weapons, and space initiatives starting with the 2021 budget, which is expected in February.
*** The National Security Agency issued guidance Jan. 22 on mitigating cloud vulnerabilities. The document is designed to focus security managers and systems administrators to configuration risks, risks that can result from poor access control, vulnerabilities arising from sharing cloud space with other organizations as well as vulnerabilities in the supply chain.
*** Last week saw movement in two lawsuits that are looking to force the Defense Department to rethink its $10 billion cloud computing contract, awarded to Microsoft in October. In a filing opposing the original design of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure procurement, Oracle argues that the award to Microsoft doesn't moot its case, now on appeal, even though Oracle argued that the request for information was conceived with Amazon Web Services in mind as the eventual winner.
Meanwhile AWS pressed forward with an expected request for the judge in their protest lawsuit to halt work on the JEDI contract while the court considers their claim that they lost the contract to Microsoft due to political interference. That request comes as DOD has already issued a $1 million JEDI task order. Ross Wilkers rounds it all up for Washington Technology.
Posted on Jan 27, 2020 at 2:17 AM