Nicolas Fischbach, global chief technology officer at Forcepoint, wrote in a guest piece published Friday on Nextgov that government agencies should prioritize data visibility and data loss prevention as they head into 2021. He said agencies should determine how employees and other users interact with government data through user activity monitoring with the aid of behavioral analytics to better detect compromised accounts and malicious actors.

IBM and Salesforce have teamed up to help government agencies, businesses and schools verify an individual's health and vaccine status to enable them to safely reopen amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The partnership will facilitate the integration of IBM Digital Health Pass with the Salesforce Work.com platform to provide organizations with a single tool for making data-driven decisions as they work to streamline communications, initiate actions and reduce risks.

The U.S. Army is set to hold a mobile 155mm howitzer shoot-off at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona in early 2021 and companies are announcing their selection to participate in the event while others are expressing interest to take part in the activity, Defense News reported Thursday.

Tory Bruno, president and CEO of United Launch Alliance and a previous Wash100 awardee, said ULA's Vulcan Centaur rocket will be on the launch pad for its maiden flight by the end of 2021, SpaceNews reported Thursday.

The U.S. Army and South Korea-based defense company Hanwha have agreed to partner to research and build defense platforms, Defense News reported Wednesday. Hanwha and the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Armaments Center will exchange technical knowledge, intellectual property and resources under the cooperative research and development agreement.

A new Deloitte report has identified nine technology trends that are likely to cause disruption for government agencies over the next 12 to 18 months. The company's annual report Tech Trends 2021: A Government Perspective scored each trend based on its relevance to agencies and the government's readiness to implement such trends and showed that machine learning operations or MLOps, revitalization of core assets, zero trust approaches and a reboot of the digital workplace were considered the most relevant to agencies.

Northrop Grumman has made an investment in Deepwave Digital and partnered with the company to advance research-and-development work on artificial intelligence to enhance communications processing capability.

Petko Stoyanov, chief technology officer for global governments at Forcepoint, wrote in an opinion piece published Monday on C4ISRNET that federal agencies looking to implement a zero trust architecture should enable behavioral analytics by consolidating identity platforms.

Small satellite maker Blue Canyon Technologies has wrapped up a critical design review of its X-SAT Saturn-class satellite bus for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Blackjack program.

Carahsoft Technology has agreed to offer Opus Interactive's suite of hybrid and multicloud platforms and services to public sector customers through the former's Cloud Purchasing Program. "Opus Interactive's focus on compliance with FedRAMP and the latest regulatory mandates makes them a great addition to our cloud solutions portfolio under CPP,“ said John Lee, vice president of cloud services at Carahsoft.

Julie McPherson, an executive vice president and head of digital solutions business at Booz Allen Hamilton, wrote in a guest piece published Friday on Nextgov that there are five rules technology leaders at federal agencies should consider to maintain the momentum in digital transformation to meet mission needs and one is planning for and harnessing failure to continuously improve a platform.

The U.S. Army has announced its intent to seek proposals for the Future Long Range Assault Aircraft program, Defense News reported Thursday.

A new Professional Services Council survey has identified five themes based on interviews with more than 22 government officials from 10 federal agencies and one of those is operational resilience and adaptability of the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic. Government respondents in the 2020 Biennial Acquisition Policy Survey: A New Paradigm said procurement offices shifted to telework with minimal interruptions to business operations.

Henry Sowell, chief information officer for Cloudera Government Solutions, wrote in a guest piece published Wednesday on Nextgov that agencies seeking to optimize streaming data for decision-making should adopt a data platform that could help analyze large volumes of data in real time using artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The Air Force's Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer program announced at the AFWERX Accelerate event that it will release the first open topic for fiscal year 2021 on Jan. 14, in coordination with the Department of Defense. The first open topic will run through Feb. 18 and the second and third open topics will be released respectively in May and September next year and close 30 days after.