Agencies are working together in new ways and using technology as a catalyst. They are finding opportunities to use cross-agency data for insights to improve services and solve problems. Many governments have seen how collaboration speeds initiatives to drive economic growth and are finding opportunities to securely use cross-agency data for insights. Emerging technologies also offer new opportunities for workforce development to enhance the customer experience and foster a sustainable future. 

Microsoft wanted to explore how US agencies are using data as a foundation for preparedness. So we invited three industry thought leaders to discuss trends in public safety, health and human services (HHS), and transportation. 

Developing safer communities through data collaboration between government agencies

Public-safety agencies rely on interagency collaboration to tackle the challenges of growing data volumes, evolving policy standards and utilizing technology to enhance communities. 

Maria Cardiellos is the Executive Director of the Integrated Justice Information Systems (IJIS) Institute. This nonprofit brings together professionals from private and public sectors to collaborate on solutions that address community challenges. Cardiellos sees how enabling data collaboration can solve public challenges by bridging communication gaps. This can lead to better community outcomes. 

Some of the IJIS Institute’s recent initiatives include replacing incarceration with rehabilitation. This progress inspires Cardiellos. Collaboration among law enforcement, courts, and practitioners has advanced these efforts. By sharing records, they can make better policy decisions. 

“Policy comes into play when sharing data across departments,” says Cardiellos. “The more domains that we bring together to exchange data, the more complex those policy changes can be.” 

To address these challenges, governments are creating communities of subject-matter experts from different departments. The result is easier collaboration and more cohesive policy changes. 

Tune in to the full interview for more insights from Cardiellos. Learn how data sharing and cross-agency collaboration are impacting public safety. 

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Innovating the delivery of health and human services programs 

Health and Human Services (HHS) agencies are finding success in data collaboration efforts that enhance public access to health and social service programs. 

Jess Maneely is the Assistant Director for Process Innovation at the American Public Human Services Association (APHSA), a non-profit association that seeks to influence modern policies that support the health and well-being of children and families. Maneely emphasizes that meeting the needs of people comes from being proactive, not reactive. 

“This focus uses process innovation efforts to transform the systems and modes of service delivery,” says Maneely. “This is done through customer-centered approaches that minimize barriers, remove redundancies, and reduce administrative burden.” 

However, making space for innovation and data-driven strategies while maintaining policy compliance can be challenging. Prioritizing coordination points between HHS programs helps people connect seamlessly to all qualifying services. This can be done using links like application programming interfaces and integrated systems. 

APHSA initiated coordinated efforts by launching a community meeting to gather administrators from many HHS agencies. They share processing improvements, discuss challenges, and find solutions for participation gaps and application automation across HHS programs. These programs include the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). 

Go into more depth in the video. Discover how HHS programs use process innovation to include a community voice in its data strategy to enhance human service delivery. 

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Adopting modern technology to enhance transportation infrastructure safety and efficiency 

The next evolution of transportation safety is the move to a digitized collaboration of agencies. New technologies help optimize investments already in place. They allow for dynamic management of those assets that lead to safer outcomes for residents.  

Laura Chace, President and CEO of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America, notes the importance of a data-centric transportation initiative. 

“In the last 50 years, our infrastructure was built with concrete and steel. But in the next 50 years, it is going to be built with software and code,” says Chace. 

Investments in digital infrastructure, such as AI software, open many opportunities. For example, data can help shorten emergency response times. It can also analyze traffic patterns while congestion-prediction tools help authorities reroute traffic in real-time. This can help prevent accidents and reduce carbon emissions. 

Follow the conversation with Laura Chase in this video. You’ll gain insight into data’s impact on transportation. You’ll also learn how diversity and inclusion efforts are broadening women’s roles in the industry. 

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Creating a diverse community of data-driven success for the public sector 

These discussions with industry leaders can inspire new ideas. Emerging solutions can elevate public safety, transform service delivery, and impact approaches to critical infrastructure. This can be accomplished by using data for institutional progress. 

In the coming years, collaboration and data sharing between public agencies will lead to even more innovations.  

Improve your data-driven strategy by learning more about the technology used in Microsoft for Government.

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As part of our commitment to enhancing cybersecurity across the U.S., we are detailing a series of actions Microsoft is taking to support federal, state, and local governments, and partnerships we’re forging with federal agencies to share critical information and develop cybersecurity best practices.

Investing in our shared cyber responsibility to modernize, secure, and defend

Microsoft recognizes that the technology sector bears a great responsibility for securing our nation’s critical assets. This is why Microsoft has committed to investing in people and technology to advance the tools, practices, and services Microsoft provides to customers.

As the White House announced, Microsoft will immediately provide $150 million in technical services to help federal, state, and local governments upgrade security protection. This funding extends Microsoft FastTrack program support to help agencies modernize and establish Zero Trust controls that will raise the security baseline for government agencies. Of the $150M, $50M will be invested to provide Federal agencies with modernization assistance to help secure applications and servers by replacing vulnerable legacy infrastructure with cloud infrastructure that is always patched and up to date.

Microsoft’s investments aim to help agencies more quickly and effectively deploy modern applications and infrastructure that incorporate Zero Trust architectures and include additional built-in security capabilities such as Microsoft 365 Defender, Microsoft Information Protection, and Azure Security Center. We are ready now to help government modernize, secure, and defend their digital estate using established best practices and cloud security capabilities based on insights from our own journey toward Zero Trust and decades of experience helping federal agencies.

Collaborating to accelerate technical innovation

To adequately address software supply chain security, we also believe it’s essential to continue to work with the open-source community, in open standards forums, and with widely used platforms to address ecosystem-wide variability and help scale implementation.

At the White House, we reiterated our commitment to working with National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to advance a common and open industry framework for ensuring end-to-end supply chain security, integrity, quality, and provenance. With President Biden’s May 12 Executive Order as a catalyst, Microsoft developed our Supply Chain Integrity Model (SCIM), which enables automated verification of supply chain security policies, artifacts, and evidence for all product types, including software, machine learning datasets, and hardware. To help standardize SCIM, we’ve made information available publicly through NIST and GitHub and engaged with industry partners through the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) to create ecosystem-wide solutions for supply chain security.

Separately, Microsoft is working with NIST’s National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) on the Implementing a Zero Trust Architecture Project. This work focuses on developing practical, interoperable approaches to designing and building Zero Trust architectures that align with the tenets and principles documented in NIST SP 800-207, Zero Trust Architecture.

Lastly, we are using our existing GitHub and Microsoft Visual Studio capabilities and developer tools for software testing and dependency tracking to enable trustworthy software development practices.

Facilitating more seamless information sharing

No single agency or company can address our nation’s cyber security challenge alone, which is why Microsoft has long been a believer in partnering with agencies to share threat information in the interest of national defense.

Microsoft recently agreed to become an Alliance Partner in the new Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative (JCDC) established by Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to promote resilience and strengthen cyber defense. We’re also taking several further steps to help defend our nation’s cybersecurity, providing federal agencies targeted or compromised by a nation-state actor with notifications and enhanced reporting to CISA from our Digital Security Unit.

Addressing the skills gap through training and resources

Our nation is facing a cybersecurity talent crisis with nearly 500,000 unfilled cybersecurity jobs today. Microsoft committed at the White House to expand partnerships with community colleges and non-profits for cybersecurity training to help the workforce keep pace with in-demand skills.

We are also dedicated to providing agencies actionable insights and tools to accelerate modernization and help cyber professionals stay ahead of sophisticated adversaries. Microsoft has launched a free repository of educational resources to address the critical cybersecurity shortage and gaps. There, agencies can access government-specific training, Learning Paths, workshops, certifications, and reference architectures like our Zero Trust Scenario Architectures mapped to NIST standards.

Doing our part in a whole-of-nation effort

The steps detailed above for government agencies are part of a broader commitment to establish cybersecurity at the heart of everything we do. This includes investing $20 billion over the next five years to accelerate improved cybersecurity outcomes for all of our customers by integrating cybersecurity by design and delivering advanced security solutions. We believe that close collaboration with industry and government is essential to helping modernize and secure the critical assets upon which the American people rely. For more information on Microsoft’s commitments and additional resources on how to increase cyber resilience, visit our Cyber EO resource center.

The post Microsoft expands on cybersecurity commitments for U.S. government agencies appeared first on Microsoft in Business Blogs.

By leveraging a range of technology tools, including Microsoft Azure cloud and AI solutions, and Microsoft Teams and Office 365, agencies across the federal government were able to continue to meet their missions, even under unprecedented circumstances. We’ve continued to innovate across our government technology portfolio in the past year – and we continue to evolve our offerings. Here are a few examples:

• Offering cloud capabilities at all data classification levels – we are delivering commercial innovation for classified data with the expansion of Azure Government Secret and the announcement of Azure Government Top Secret, currently in accreditation.
• Expanding capabilities at the tactical edge – we recognize the reality of our hybrid world and not everything can or will operate in the cloud.
• Taking the next giant leap with Azure Space – fast, secure worldwide satellite networking can give mission owners a new communications channel and ubiquitous, hyperscale computing environment. Microsoft is the only company working to deliver multiple connectivity paths and network options to provide true global cloud capability.
• We also recently announced a partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise to bring Microsoft Azure to the International Space Station, delivering edge computing and artificial intelligence capabilities in space for the first time.

We’ve continued to advance the Microsoft cloud to meet the full spectrum of government needs while complying with stringent U.S. regulatory standards, including:

• Microsoft 365 Government meets FedRAMP High, the Department of Defense (DoD) Impact Level 4 (IL4) and Impact Level 5 (IL5).
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 and our Power Platform recently received DOD IL5 provisional authorization.
• Azure Government achieves FedRAMP High, DOD IL4 and IL5.

Federal Momentum

For more than 40 years, we have been a committed technology partner for the federal government. Today, our work with the federal government includes every federal cabinet agency and branch of the DoD. Time and again, federal agencies have chosen Microsoft to solve their most challenging problems. These include:

• supporting the U.S. Department of Defense to rapidly transition its workforce of one million plus from the office to working remote in a matter of weeks at the outset of the pandemic. This was the “largest rollout ever implemented in this short amount of time,” as noted by the Department’s then CIO, Dana Deasy.
• advancing digital transformation efforts and cloud-based productivity capabilities through the Defense Enterprise Office Solution, the DoD’s enterprise-wide solution to deploy Microsoft 365 software and services to their 3 million+ workforce;
• enabling the Small Business Administration to incorporate enhanced security into its new remote work environment. Leveraging Microsoft cloud and AI capabilities, SBA is developing a zero-trust security environment for its 20,000 plus workforce to ensure the agency can securely distribute pandemic-related funds to boost the nation’s economy.
• innovating with the Department of Veterans Affairs to pilot a next generation hospital through its “Project Convergence” The VA is partnering with Verizon to enable a 5G infrastructure at its Palo Alto, California facility and with Microsoft to deploy HoloLens 2 devices to help doctors access and manipulate complex information in interactive models and 3D holograms.

We also continue to expand industry partnerships to bring the latest Microsoft technology to more federal agencies – we recently announced an agreement with GDIT to extend Azure services, including access to Azure Government classified regions to their federal clients. This partnership builds on GDIT’s recent win on the Defense Enterprise Office Solution (DEOS) contract, the enterprise-wide solution to deploy Microsoft 365 software and services to the 3 million+ DoD employees.

Custom approach

Microsoft’s momentum with federal agencies is the result of our technology, our people and trust developed over decades. Our innovative and trusted intelligent cloud, productivity and collaboration tools, and business application solutions work together to enable greater depth of insights faster, for better decision making and outcomes.

We’ve brought on a team of experts that have lived mission and understand the challenges faced by the customer, embedded in our engineering teams. These include a Medal of Honor recipient, former leaders of large analyst teams, former National Security Council staffers, and infantry platoon leaders. They also include engineers that have worked deeply in national security domains at agencies such as DARPA.

This continuous advancement, innovation and engagement reflects why the DOD selected and later reaffirmed that our Microsoft Azure-powered JEDI proposal “continues to represent the best value to the government.” Work on this project is on hold as legal challenges are litigated. We are ready to immediately begin performance to deliver on JEDI as soon as the litigation is resolved — and we hope that happens soon for the sake of our military men and women who urgently need these mission-critical capabilities.

Looking ahead

As we stand in the early months of 2021, many urgent challenges remain, not least of which involve the efforts to control the pandemic. Microsoft is committed to continuing our work across all levels of government to help provide tools and resources to enable the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines in a safe, secure and equitable manner.

Our commitment to the next 40 years of partnership with — and support of — the U.S. government has never been stronger or felt more exciting, as we roll up our sleeves together to usher in digital transformation of which we can all be proud.

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