FCW Insider: Aug. 23

Chris Krebs, the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at DHS, said that many federal agencies will be outsourcing cyber to a shared service provider in the future. Mark Rockwell has more on CISA's newly articulated mission and strategic intent.

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) wants the Defense Department to shore up cyber vulnerabilities in the supply chain and says the newly formed Cyberspace Solarium Commission could help. Lauren C. Williams explains why the alarm is sounding on supply chain risk.

To support long-term modernization initiatives, agencies must invest in skilled staff and open, automated and collaborative processes, writes Red Hat's David Egts in this FCW commentary.

Quick Hits

*** Virtualization and infrastructure firm VMWare announced the acquisition of cybersecurity vendor Carbon Black for $2.1 billion. VMWare, which does a lot of government business, will extend its offerings to include endpoint protection and anti-malware products with the acquisition. VMware is also acquiring Pivotal for $2.7 billion. Pivotal, whose products help integrate applications across different cloud environments and compute infrastructures, was spun out of pieces of VMWare and Dell, which owns a controlling stake in VMWare.

The news comes a day after Splunk announced a $1 billion acquisition that extends its network monitoring tools into the cloud.

*** Emails and documents released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) revealed new details about how a cadre of technology management professionals at the Department of Veterans Affairs had to brief and entertain requests from a trio of non-governmental employees who had an interest in the VA's acquisition of a commercial electronic health records system and were associates of President Donald Trump and members of Trump's Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.

The influence of the group, who came to be known as the Mar-a-Lago Three, was revealed in articles by Politico and ProPublica. Eventually, the House Veterans Affairs Committee announced a probe of the influence of the group.

In the documents posted by CREW, VA officials complain about "ridiculous" questions and that "this guy is way out of his depth in understanding [electronic medical records] and how things get done.