Who owns the information that we share with tech companies to power their solutions, and what are their obligations to us to protect it?

Cloud services are now fundamental to our lives. We store our photos and email files in the cloud, use social apps that run in the cloud, and even access health and financial records through the cloud. The cloud enables us to share our lives – and our information – with those who matter most. The facility and efficiency of this platform is what drives government to cloud models. Today, hybrid cloud models play an integral and growing role in the way the government stores data and shares information.

Every day it seems there is a new announcement about a cyber attack affecting the Defense Industrial Base (DIB). In this timely episode of Defense TechCast, host Leslie Weinstein interviews Bailey Bickley, chief of DIB Defense at NSA’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center. Bickley’s goal? Scale ‘intel-driven cybersecurity across the U.S. defense industry.’

In an ideal world, no device and/or user can access an organization's data without real-time verification. However, real-time decision making requires a strong foundation, and tight integration across multiple, often siloed, domains. Read how Guidehouse helps federal agencies and departments' key stakeholders develop a dynamic security mindset by identifying Zero Trust as a paradigm shift.

In federal agencies and beyond, the risk landscape is shifting. As the risk environment evolves, the tools agencies use to monitor and evaluate risks must also evolve. Experts from Guidehouse discuss why Federal Agencies should consider commercially available governance, risk, and compliance solutions.

Get the 411 on the DHS security clearance process. In addition to overseeing its own personnel security program, DHS also has oversight of the federal and government contractor credentialing process through Homeland Security Presidential Directive (HSPD) 12. HSPD 12 creates a common standard for issuing access to secure facilities.

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) in recent years has captured global attention, particularly with the introduction of Generative AI and OpenAI's latest Large Language Models (LLMs). The ChatGPT website from OpenAI has enabled regular users to engage with these models. This has created fierce competition among US tech behemoths (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, IBM, and others) and startups, constantly releasing new capabilities through updated models.

During all phases of disaster management, it is common to see local volunteers supporting a wide range of activities, including community outreach, administrative support, and disaster planning. Read the article published in the Journal of Business Continuity & Emergency Planning, co-authored by Matt Lyttle, Director at Guidehouse, that examines the state of disaster volunteerism in Latin American and Spanish-speaking communities in the USA.

The U.S. federal government is the largest employer in the country, bringing a responsibility to ensure equity and the fair and just treatment of all employees. As our world navigates the post-pandemic landscape, government agencies’ return-to-work plans must enable equitable returns that are inclusive of all identity groups. Explore key organizational considerations for the return to the workplace and strategies to address barriers from Guidehouse.

In most academic and governmental literature, homeland and national security are different disciplines. They are listed in policy and studied in universities as if they are barely related. Homeland security is typically considered either a sub-component of national security or synonymous with policing and emergency management. By defining homeland security in this way, it has never really accounted for transnational threats and has become outdated.

Twelve-year-old Gary Leschinsky is a nationally-ranked chess player in the U.S. He has a bright future ahead of him — but it may not be in chess. Why? The reality is that there’s not much future for people in chess anymore. Machines have become so advanced that they will always beat us in the game, however smart we are. In "Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World", David Epstein notes that this has been the case since grandmaster Garry Kasparov’s loss to the IBM supercomputer in 1997, and that it’s a sign that perhaps we should be outsourcing tactical tasks to computers. Similarly, translation, spell checking, copyediting, transcription, and other jobs heavily reliant on rote memory have all begun to be outsourced to computers.

From understanding complex financial data for the world’s largest banks to transforming manual processes for insurers and federal agencies alike, automating unstructured data represents the largest opportunity for digital transformation in the enterprise. To solve this, our design principle for Instabase has been consistent: we strive to continuously evolve the toolkits and solution building blocks available on our platform with the latest innovations from the market – not just from us. Over the past few months, we have innovated at pace with the latest advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning space, and today, we are announcing our first set of deep learning capabilities to empower organizations to solve document understanding use cases with unmatched accuracy.

By now, all federal agencies are aware of the governmentwide requirement to transition all records and documents — both temporary and permanent — into a digital format for archiving. This requirement, embodied in the 2019 Office of Management and Budget/National Archives and Records Administration memo M-19-21, states that “after December 31, 2022, NARA will no longer accept new transfers of permanent or temporary analog records to the fullest extent possible.”

Today, Microsoft is expanding our commitments and contributions to the Christchurch Call, a critical multistakeholder initiative to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online. These new commitments are part of our wider work to advance the responsible use of AI and are focused on empowering researchers, increasing transparency and explainability around recommender systems, and promoting responsible AI safeguards. We’re supporting these commitments with a new $500,000 pledge to the Christchurch Call Initiative on Algorithmic Outcomes to fund research on privacy-enhancing technologies and the societal impact of AI-powered recommendation engines.

Airlines for America (A4A) and the U.S. airline industry prioritizes security and investments in strategic measures to mitigate and proactively address risk. We know our success in keeping our employees, passengers and aircraft safe is not the product of happenstance. Rather, it is the result of deliberate, systematic improvements over many years of collaboration with our federal government partners, and constantly challenging ourselves to meet and exceed the highest standards.

Over the past several years, the use of unmanned aerial platforms has grown. From commercial to government applications, Unmanned Aircraft Vehicles (UAV) and Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) provide new capabilities for both the private and public sectors, such as increasing safety, improving facilitation, and expanding the reaches of telecommunications.

While many financial management (FM) organizations have a moonshot goal to transform themselves, they are swamped managing the workload day-to-day to meet operations, while ensuring legal and regulatory compliance. In addition to this regulatory burden, financial management and operations are support functions, not revenue-driving, bringing additional pressure to reduce costs.

Transformation is a reality for every organization. Circumstances, missions, and customers evolve, and organizations must change to position themselves for success. Many organizations blunder through transformations because they ignore the challenges of managing change.

Real transformation is difficult to accomplish, but it can be even harder to measure. Whether you are transforming a technology platform, business processes, your strategic priorities, or even an organizational culture, nothing is ever quite as simple as it seems. Most often, transformation efforts begin with an idea.

The Homeland Security Enterprise Forum (HSEF) continually strives to engage in thought dialogue, educate the public and inform government leadership. Today, HSEF is honored to share a security-related professional blog from our partner SIMS Software featuring Michael J. Orlando in an informative and insightful exchange on continued/emerging challenges many of our readers face.

Editor’s note: Today Microsoft published a new intelligence report, Defending Ukraine: Early Lessons from the Cyber War. This report represents research conducted by Microsoft’s threat intelligence and data science teams with the goal of sharpening our understanding of the threat landscape in the ongoing war in Ukraine.

Today we are sharing publicly Microsoft’s Responsible AI Standard, a framework to guide how we build AI systems. It is an important step in our journey to develop better, more trustworthy AI. We are releasing our latest Responsible AI Standard to share what we have learned, invite feedback from others, and contribute to the discussion about building better norms and practices around AI.

Revolutionary. Transformational. Moonshot. Organizational transformation is about finding new and better ways to achieve your mission. Tackling and solving long standing problems. Engaging more successfully with customers and stakeholders to achieve common interests. Creating a culture that links the workforce to your mission, and where the creativity and contributions from your workforce are visible in your mission success.

Revolutionary. Transformational. Moonshot. Each of these words brings images of overcoming challenges, daring greatly, and believing in the unbelievable. We love the stories that highlight these trials and tribulations and the feel-good movies that end in triumph.

Diversity matters to our nation’s national security, plain and simple. To address the country’s most pressing national security and foreign policy challenges, it is paramount that our federal departments, offices and agencies have a workforce that is diverse in culture and life experience to meet complex issues head on.

The world changed irrevocably on 9/11/01, as it had with the earlier attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 and each terrorist event which preceded at our embassies and military interests on land and at sea. The intelligence community is, was and always will be relentless in the pursuit of those who plan and carry out attacks against our national interests, characterized by an unparalleled depth of human capital who serve careers in the shadows, invisible to most, matched with the best available technology.

As we approach the 20-year mark of 9/11, we all have unforgettable memories of that morning and the period afterward. I still imagine the thoughts of those trapped in buildings and aircraft, the resolve of the first responders who rushed into the sites, knowing the dangers, and of course, the impact on those who were left behind.

Cutting edge technology has driven us towards a new era of capabilities to secure 21st Century America, bringing forth new methods of protection with stronger cybersecurity, biometric, and artificial intelligence capabilities, but with these strides into advancement come added risk and threats in our digital world.