Government Technology

Firefly Aerospace plans to raise $350 million in funds to ramp up production, advance long-term growth initiatives and further develop a larger launch vehicle, SpaceNews reported Wednesday. Tom Markusic, CEO of Firefly Aerospace, said the company would use $125 million of the funds to support “product enhancements” such as tooling and facilities to scale up the production of its launch vehicles.

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Teresa Carlson, vice president of the worldwide public sector and industries at Amazon Web Services and a six-time Wash100 awardee, wrote in an article published Wednesday on the World Economic Forum website that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated technology adoption and organizations seeking to benefit from technologies should “support the development of a workforce with digital skills.” She said there are four “must-have conditions” to help meet the need around skills development and build a future-ready workforce and one is equal access to skills training and education.

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Viasat has ramped up its monthly production of next generation tactical data link radio to more than 200 non-developmental item Link 16 radios in a bid to meet the demand of various clients from the U.S. and international defense markets.

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Jeremy Goldberg, a member of the worldwide public sector organization at Microsoft, wrote in a guest piece published Tuesday on Nextgov that government agencies looking to build a resilient technology infrastructure in support of digital government initiatives should push for long-term, sustained investments. “To succeed, governments must create long-term integrated plans that encompass enterprise architecture, funding and policy support for scaling infrastructure, shared services, automation and workforce development/skills building,” he suggested.

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In-Q-Tel has invested in Chicago-based Catalytic to help the latter further develop and bring its no-code workflow automation platform to the government sector.

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More than 130 countries have privacy laws in place and a new Cisco report has found that 79 percent of security professionals said they believe these laws meant to hold organizations and governments accountable for their data management have had a positive impact. Cisco surveyed more than 4,400 security professionals from 25 countries in summer 2020 for the Data Privacy Benchmark Study and found that 93 percent of organizations said their privacy teams played a key role in helping them respond to COVID-19 pandemic-related challenges, including the shift to telework and implementation of controls on the use and access of shared personal information.

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Honeywell has announced that its next generation inertial sensors –being developed under a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program– has achieved more accuracy than the company's HG1930 tactical-grade inertial measurement unit based on laboratory findings.

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Palo Alto Networks has added three cloud products to its suite of government-approved offerings under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program. The Palo Alto Networks Government Cloud Services now includes the Prisma Cloud, Cortex XDR and Cortex Data Lake platforms that have received moderate FedRAMP authorization with the help of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the company said Monday.

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The national security solutions affiliate of Idemia and Calabasas, California-based facial and object recognition technology company StereoVision Imaging have partnered to market a biometric recognition tool that uses the former's identity software and the latter's 4D lidar technology.

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The U.S. Army received 115 production prototype units of a platform built by L3Harris Technologies based on its other electro-optical fire control systems and in support of the service branch's Next Generation Squad Weapon program.

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CACI International has handed over to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory a laser communications transmitter designed to send data across 200 million miles at optimized speeds.

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