https://fedtechmagazine.com/ en https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/security-stack-working-are-your-security-operations Walk into a modern enterprise security operations center today, and you'll discover just how inexpensive 65-inch monitors are: The walls are covered with them showing dashboards from security information and event management (SIEM) consoles, extended detection and response (XDR) endpoint security platforms, firewall intrusion prevention systems (IPS) and data loss protection (DLP) software. It's all very impressive and mission-control. Yet breaches still occur. And after the worst of them, the postmortem is almost always a variation of the same story. Yes, the alert was received. The log… Wed, 30 Sep 2026 13:39:50 -0400 Joel Snyder https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/security-stack-working-are-your-security-operations https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/cdw-summit-2026-it-leaders-seek-new-north-star-age-ai IT leaders are the midst of an identity crisis. Long seen as back-office superheroes, some IT leaders now find themselves expected to serve as innovators, evangelists and even the “fun people.” “I didn’t know that we were the fun people, man. Like, I was supposed to do one thing, now I have to worry about if it’s fun or not?” said Carollo Engineers CIO Andrew Ivey to his fellow panelist, St. Luke’s University Health Network Associate CISO Krista Arndt. The two were having an introspective but casual discussion about how they were responding to all of the changes in the workplace and IT —… Mon, 28 Sep 2026 12:37:53 -0400 Ricky Ribeiro https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/cdw-summit-2026-it-leaders-seek-new-north-star-age-ai https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/when-small-language-models-are-right-fit-federal-ai Current federal guidance calls for agencies to accelerate responsible adoption of generative artificial intelligence to improve government efficiency and increase the quality of public services. While using large language models (LLMs) may be the first instinct here and sound synonymous with generative AI, the true mission requirements are more complicated. In particular, the rise of agentic AI use in government is exposing the need for a more nuanced approach to shaping language model size to the nature of the mission.  By decomposing larger objectives into smaller, modular tasks,… Fri, 25 Sep 2026 10:45:54 -0400 Darren Pulsipher https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/when-small-language-models-are-right-fit-federal-ai https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/five-questions-ask-launching-your-next-ai-pilot How can artificial intelligence help solve real world problems? It’s the question on every federal IT leader’s mind. After the demo, it’s time to run a pilot to see whether the project is ready to be part of a useful system or needs more workshopping. But it’s not uncommon for AI projects to fail in production even after seemingly successful pilots. Where there are many reasons for this, it clearly indicates the pilot was flawed. To improve the design of your next pilot, here are five questions to ask before launch. Click the banner below to learn why data governance underpins responsible AI… Thu, 24 Sep 2026 12:20:44 -0400 Joel Snyder https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/five-questions-ask-launching-your-next-ai-pilot https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/new-federal-procurement-playbook-google-public-sector-joins-dhss-cumulus-cloud The Department of Homeland Security has awarded Google Public Sector a contract potentially worth just under $876 million to provide commercial cloud services across the department. This marks the third and latest deal struck under Cumulus, DHS’s push to purchase cloud services on a departmentwide basis rather than one component at a time. In an award notice published Monday, the DHS Office of Procurement Operations named Google’s public sector arm to a single-award, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract covering commercially available “Anything as a Service” offerings:… Wed, 23 Sep 2026 15:59:24 -0400 Ashley Hackett https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/new-federal-procurement-playbook-google-public-sector-joins-dhss-cumulus-cloud https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/data-governance-foundation-trustworthy-agentic-ai For years, federal agencies have treated data governance as a defensive discipline, something tied to compliance audits, retention policies and risk reduction. That mindset is no longer sufficient. As agentic artificial intelligence systems move from experimentation into production, data governance is becoming something far more important: the operational foundation that determines how AI systems behave. This is a major shift. Traditional AI systems primarily generated insights or recommendations for humans to evaluate. Agentic AI platforms are different. These systems can reason, make… Thu, 17 Sep 2026 16:08:50 -0400 Brian Hilgenfeld https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/data-governance-foundation-trustworthy-agentic-ai https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/what-ai-cyber-defense-means-federal-agencies For a long time, the federal technology industry’s biggest security problem was simple to state but hard to solve: You can’t protect what you can’t see. As an industry, we spent the better part of a decade fixing that — building real visibility into what agencies own and, just as important, what those assets are experiencing right now. As good as that progress was, it created a new problem. All of that monitoring generates enormous volumes of data flowing into central systems, and for years we asked highly trained, highly paid human analysts to sit and watch it, hunting for patterns. It’s… Tue, 15 Sep 2026 13:29:08 -0400 Asim Iqbal https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/what-ai-cyber-defense-means-federal-agencies https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/dangerous-accountability-gap-federal-ai-use Federal agencies are integrating artificial intelligence into cybersecurity operations at a pace that has outrun the governance structures meant to support it. As AI takes on a growing role in identifying threats, prioritizing responses and even recommending action, one question remains largely unanswered: Who is responsible when an AI-assisted decision goes wrong? When agencies fail to address this gap in accountability, they find themselves absorbing risk they never intended to own. The realities of federal IT, such as legacy infrastructure, procurement cycles and interagency coordination… Mon, 14 Sep 2026 12:31:31 -0400 Travis Galloway https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/dangerous-accountability-gap-federal-ai-use https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/cryptographic-bills-materials-are-now-federal-requirement-perfcon Buried in the recent executive order on quantum cryptography is a requirement that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) publish guidance on the minimum elements for a cryptographic bill of materials. A CBOM enables automated assessments of the cryptographic assets in any hardware or software. That makes it a foundational — and newly mandated — concept for federal IT. What Is a CBOM? A CBOM is an inventory of all the cryptographic assets in a system — algorithms, keys, certificates, libraries and protocols —… Tue, 08 Sep 2026 14:45:37 -0400 Adam Stone https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/cryptographic-bills-materials-are-now-federal-requirement-perfcon https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/how-cisa-bod-26-04-changing-risk-based-vulnerability-management-perfcon In the wake of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)’s June 10 Binding Operational Directive 26-04, federal agencies can no longer prioritize vulnerability remediation primarily by technical severity. The BOD, “Prioritizing Security Updates Based on Risk,” replaces uniform patching deadlines with timelines based on whether a vulnerability can be used against a particular asset and what an attacker could accomplish. The directive supersedes BOD 19-02 and BOD 22-01, which established the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. It evaluates each asset-vulnerability pair… Fri, 04 Sep 2026 14:51:14 -0400 Nathan Eddy https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2026/09/how-cisa-bod-26-04-changing-risk-based-vulnerability-management-perfcon