FedRAMP releases framework for cloud security assessments

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program has released a document detailing what third-party assessment organizations will have to test before cloud service providers can be approved for government use.

Released Tuesday, the FedRAMP Penetration Test Guidance lays out how to test IT systems for security weaknesses, and how to gauge compliance to guidelines, employees’ security awareness and response to security incidents.

The test guidance builds on various NIST security frameworks, breaking down how assessment organizations should test each type of cloud — software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service — for vulnerabilities that could be exploited, otherwise known as “attack vectors.”

The document also goes over the methodology behind various security tests — including testing for Web and mobile applications, and APIs, or application programming interfaces — along with simulated internal attack vectors.

All cloud service providers must complete the penetration test before FedRAMP gives them the authority to operate. Also, FedRAMP requires that all approved cloud service providers go through a penetration test at least once a year.

The testing is just one part of the FedRAMP approval process, which often has additional layers of security depending on the agency that’s interested in using the cloud offering.

Read the full guidance below.

California teachers allege online school operator K12 Inc. misused federal funds

Last December, a group of teachers from California Virtual Academies sent a letter to the North Carolina Board of Education, warning officials not to replicate the network of charter schools run by for-profit company K12 Inc.

“As teachers at CAVA, we have grown increasingly concerned about the direction of our school,” they wrote, using the schools’ acronym. “We believe that decisions being made by CAVA and K12 management are oftentimes not in the best interests of either students or teachers, and have negatively impacted the quality of education offered at our school.”

The warning went unheeded. Several days later, North Carolina officials approved a school run by the Virginia-based K12 Inc., making it the latest in a string of about 33 states to open the virtual academies despite consistently low performance and graduation rates across the board.

Now the CAVA teachers are escalating their concerns. On June 19, the group filed 69 complaints with state education authorities, alleging that K12 Inc. is failing special needs students, inflating enrollment numbers, violating student privacy laws and using federal funds for retreats in places like Yosemite National Park.

“Their focus is not educationally driven,” special education teacher Danielle Hodge said of K12 Inc. “Their goal is profit, not outcome.”

K12 Inc. operates 11 online schools that serve about 14,000 students across California. None of the schools met state Academic Performance Index standards, according to most recent available data from 2013.

In one of the complaints, a former CAVA administrator and current CAVA teacher testified that K12 Inc. spends federal Title I funds on retreats for administrators, including on travel, hotel costs and meals. Those funds are meant to improve the academic achievement of disadvantaged students.

The California teachers, meanwhile, say the conditions at their own schools have become untenable, and they have banded together in a fight to unionize for job protections. They have been documenting their whistleblower efforts on a blog called California Virtual Educators.

A K12 Inc. spokeswoman did not return a request for comment. The company’s website asserts parents are satisfied with K12’s results, with 92 percent of parents in a 2014 survey saying “their student has benefitted academically from the K12 curriculum.”

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Education wouldn’t comment on whether the agency opened an investigation into schools run by K12 Inc., but she added, “we have conducted a number of investigations and audits involving charter schools and currently have several audits involving charter schools underway.”

From January 2005 through March 2015, the Education Department’s Office of Inspector General has opened 68 charter school investigations, but few have been conducted on virtual charter schools.

Cutting off services

Hodge, who teaches at CAVA @ San Joaquin, told FedScoop that administrators have cut off essential services to children with special needs — including one with a degenerative muscle disorder who requires a speech pathologist, according to her Individualized Education Plan, or IEP.

“We will not take it out of her IEP because she needs the service,” said Hodge. “But they have not been funding it.”

She added the pathologist has agreed to keep working with the student even though she has not been paid for the services since September.

Another teacher, Jen Shilen, said clerical work has piled up for teachers because management refuses to hire more support staff.

“When you look at how CAVA chooses to staff the school, they choose not to hire more guidance counselors or more clerical staff — anything that can be passed along to the teachers is what is done,” said Shilen, who teaches history to about 160 students a year at CAVA @ Sutter. “We would love to invest the effort to make the virtual model work, but we’re being held back by the model CAVA is using under K12 Inc.”

Follow the money

Meanwhile, K12 Inc. has generated a fortune, with revenues increasing from more than $226 million in 2008 to more than $848 million in 2013, according to the Center for Media and Democracy. It has an aggressive lobbying arm, and has fueled dozens of bills aimed at expanding virtual schooling — 157 of which have passed in 39 states, including the District of Columbia.

When it comes to accountability, “that’s the million-dollar question,” said Michael Barbour, director of doctoral studies for the Isabelle Farrington College of Education at Sacred Heart University.

“In most states, much of the legislation passed that governs the regulation of cyber charters is often directly from the proponents of cyber charters,” Barbour said in an interview. “Money, in all honesty, is the bottom line.”

According to a report released in February about CAVA schools, K12 Inc. received nearly $50 million for management, technology and administrative resources during the 2012-13 school year — but it’s unclear how much of that money went to direct services for students.

The analysis, conducted by In the Public Interest, a Washington research and policy organization, also found that K12 Inc.’s top executive raked in nearly $4 million in salary and bonuses in 2012 while the average teacher’s wages stayed stagnant at about $36,000 a year.

“What we found is absolutely reasons for concern,” said Donald Cohen, executive director of In the Public Interest. “They kept individual schools in debt. There was never any surplus for the schools, all the surplus was for K12 Inc.”

K12 Inc. officials called the report “inaccurate and deeply flawed” in a statement.

“All CAVA schools undergo annual financial audits by independent external auditors and have a long record of clean findings with no material weaknesses,” the statement read.

State allies

Hodge said an official from the California Department of Education has met with the teachers “several times” and is trying to guide them through the process of filing complaints with the charter school authorizers. In this case, the authorizers are nearby school districts that have little or no experience in dealing with virtual schools.

A spokeswoman for the department said the teachers’ grievances would be taken seriously.

“The CDE takes complaints very seriously and believes teachers should be given the respect and support they need to provide every student the best education possible,” spokeswoman Tina Jung said.

K12 Inc. has retained top labor law firm Jackson Lewis to fight the teachers’ efforts to form a union. A decision from the California Public Employment Relations Board is expected to come down this summer.

Shilen said she and several other teachers have not yet received a contract to teach again next year.

“I think some people are really worried,” she said.

Senators question White House FISMA compliance

The White House has failed to keep up with reports to Congress on its cybersecurity, according to a letter penned by two senators.

As required by the Federal Information Security Management Act, or FISMA, federal agencies must report the status of their cybersecurity systems to Congress annually. Sens. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and John Thune, R-S.D., though, say the White House Executive Office of the President hasn’t done so for the last three years.

And the last review the White House submitted to the Office of Management and Budget, which administers the requirements of the law, was for fiscal year 2008, the senators wrote in the letter to the president dated June 22. The letter wasn’t released publicly.

The senators wrote that “all agencies, expressly including the EOP, must implement a security program to take steps to secure their information and guidelines, including those from OMB, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.”

Johnson and Thune — chairmen of the committees on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and on Commerce, Science and Transportation, respectively — air their concerns in the wake of two reported breaches at the Office of Personnel Management that have compromised the personal information of at least 4.2 million federal employees.

“Recent reports that the Office of Personnel Management suffered multiple significant intrusions, resulting in the exposure of millions of employees’ personal information, only underscore the importance for every federal agency, including the EOP, to take steps to improve its cybersecurity posture,” the letter reads.

After the breaches, it became evident that OPM and several other federal agencies have not been in compliance with FISMA.

The White House hasn’t been immune to breaches itself. Last fall, hackers thought to be associated with the Russian government accessed unclassified White House networks. Lawmakers said the intrusion underscored a need for federal cybersecurity reform, much like what they’re saying now in the wake of the massive OPM breaches. Thune previously wrote to the president about the October breach but never received a response.

The pair of senators has asked for a response from the White House no later than July 13.

A senior administration official told FedScoop the White House has received the letter and is reviewing it.

Transportation’s Maria Roat on the momentum of data in 2015

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVpUF7MK004

As the Department of Transportation explores potential applications for the Internet of Things, concepts like virtualization, autonomous vehicles and cloud storage are at the top of its priority list, Chief Technology Officer Maria Roat told FedScoop in an exclusive interview.

“There’s been a big interest in data and visualization and analytics, and we’re really taking that interest and momentum we’ve generated — we’ve got a chief data officer now — we’re taking that momentum and really looking at how we share that information across the department,” Roat said. “Using innovation in that we’re sharing that information, looking how we can use data from a multimodal perspective.”

With widespread urban interconnectivity a burgeoning possibility, the DOT is preparing new ways to store — and secure — what promise to be gargantuan data sets.

“When you look at hybrid cloud solutions, you have data moving outside of your traditional perimeter within an agency,” Roat said. “Think of the cloud — it could be an extension of your network. And all the sudden you’ve got data that’s moving outside into the cloud, back and forth as users query it, and you really have to pay attention to what those pipes are — whether they’re going in or coming out.”

The DOT anticipates that a significant proportion of this new data will be the product of connected vehicles, a prospect that it has poured significant resources into researching. Not only will the vehicles be producing metadata — so too will traffic lights, road blocks and other vehicles in relation to each other. In a city of smart technology with autonomous communication capabilities, the data avenues are virtually endless.

“If you think of all the things that could potentially have sensors…how do you make that available to a driver?” Roat said.

She added, “There’s going to be a ton of [data] when you’re talking the sensor arena. And then, what do you need to keep?”

With the availability of smart technology expected to expand exponentially in coming years, Roat promises to use her remaining tenure to look towards the horizon.

“I’m really looking out for the next three years, saying… ‘Where does the department need to positioned to be able to support…changes in data as we move to the cloud — data from vehicles as we’re doing research in testing? All of those aspects.”

USAID can’t find 80 percent of the Afghan health facilities it funded — IG

If you want to help parts of the world overcome poverty and disease, you first have to be able to find them on a map. But that’s proved to be a challenge for the U.S. Agency for International Development and its work to provide health care services in war-torn Afghanistan.

According to a recent letter from John F. Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, USAID’s $210 million Partnership Contracts for Health program in Afghanistan is working with faulty location data and geospatial imagery on nearly 80 percent of the 641 health care facilities funded by the program throughout the country.

In at least 56 cases, the location data reported by USAID was completely inaccurate. For example, data reviewed by SIGAR inspectors placed six facilities in Pakistan, six facilities in Tajikistan and one in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. Location data for another 30 facilities placed them in the wrong province in Afghanistan, and in at least 13 cases, USAID reported two different facilities at the same location.

SIGAR inspectors analyzed geospatial imagery on the remaining 495 locations, but found no physical structure within 400 feet of 189 reported coordinates.

SIGAR produced a list of all of the facilities with location discrepancies and provided it to USAID, but it did not make it public due to security concerns.

“To provide meaningful oversight of these facilities, both USAID and MOPH need to know where they are,” Sopko said. “Accordingly, for all PCH facilities listed in enclosure II, I request that USAID provide correct, updated location coordinates or, as appropriate, non-geospatial confirmation of the physical location and existence of these facilities.”

USAID has until July 30 to find these facilities.

In a statement, USAID Assistant Administrator for Afghanistan and Pakistan Affairs Larry Sampler said the agency has a rigorous inspection program in place for the PCH program to ensure the facilities have staff, medicines, electricity and other support services.

However, “GPS coordinates are not the first line in monitoring a health facility,” Sampler said. “Local staff, third-party monitors, Afghan Government officials, and the benefiting community do not use GPS to navigate, let alone to find a health facility, because they are familiar with the area or from the community benefiting from the project. It has been a common practice for Afghan ministries to use the location of a village center as the coordinates for a facility, particularly when there was limited access to GPS technology. USAID is taking advantage of technological gains and is currently working with the Ministry of Public Health to provide map support and to update older and sometimes inaccurate GPS coordinates,” he said.

Meanwhile, a USAID spokesperson said Wednesday the agency has received updated mapping data that it will forward to SIGAR.

“USAID is working with other donors to help the MoPH improve its GPS data, an effort that will take time,” the spokesperson said in a written statement. “Already, the ministry has provided USAID with updated location information that USAID will provide this to SIGAR (and would have provided had it been requested prior to USAID’s receipt of SIGAR’s inquiry letter).”

USAID said it reviewed the thirteen examples cited in SIGAR’s letter as having coordinates that fall outside of Afghanistan and that all but one of the sites have been matched to the most recent MoPH data with coordinates within Afghanistan. “The remaining facility cannot be mapped because the latitude and longitude data were entered incorrectly,” the spokesperson said.

“USAID analyzed the data and found 590 sets of coordinates – after correcting latitude and longitude reversals, all of these were found to be located in Afghanistan,” according to the spokesperson. “USAID is taking advantage of technological gains and is currently working with the Ministry of Public Health to provide map support and to update older and sometimes inaccurate GPS coordinates.”

DHS’ Margie Graves on big data, budget cuts and innovation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMbDAUNb48M

Big data is the primary driver of innovation for the Department of Homeland Security in 2015, according to Deputy Chief Information Officer Margie Graves.

In the face of declining budgets and a vast increase in the capacity to collect data, engineering creative solutions to store and process information is a top priority for DHS. For a department that manages large caches of aerial and satellite imagery — which can measure in the tens of terabytes — the ability to organize and distribute its data in real time can be the difference between life and death, particularly in disaster response situations.

“Data really is the enabler of mission success,” Graves said. “It’s all about the data, the ability to attain situational awareness — to drive mission impact by getting data to the right individuals, whether it’s DHS being able to respond to threats and dangers or FEMA helping citizens respond to natural disasters. Getting data to people on the ground is so critical today.”

The department’s attempt to scale back spending and increase efficiency culminated in the Management Cube, an award-winning interface that emerged from the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act. The program allows users to access data from various sectors within DHS — financial, procurement and enterprise, to name a few — in parallel to see where costs could be cut.

A major point of reform for DHS’ Office of the CIO has been the gradual phasing out of antiquated legacy systems in favor of more efficient technology.

“Software defined networks and innovations that are coming forward at this point in time are things we would like to buy as a service. The imperative for the ever-decreasing budgets and for us to make better use of the dollar pushes us out of that paradigm to something we can actually afford that gives us predictable top line and adapt as we need to,” Graves said. “Our customers need to have a full portfolio suite of capabilities available to them that are competitive, up-to-date, innovative and probably leading-edge of what’s happening. We cannot afford to be in an own-and-operate legacy state.”

Government experts ready to take next steps with open data

The federal government needs to help its agencies and the public use the data it’s opening up.

That was the message of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association’s data symposium Tuesday, where multiple government data experts spoke about how agencies are trying to harness the power behind their open data sets to solve problems.

Karen Lee, branch chief in the Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Federal Financial Management, said the government has made large strides since the 2009 Open Government Directive, which forced agencies to open at least three data sets on Data.gov. Now with over 130,000 data sets available to the public for free, the government needs to find the right ways to effectively use that data.

“We have too much data, to be frank,” Lee said. “Our challenge is how to package data in ways in which federal managers, recipients of awards [and] those who are interested in helping the government manage better and target resources to those who need them can actually make better decisions, synthesize that information and provide better recommendations.”

Lee is among those responsible for integrating the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act — a law that requires agencies to make their financial, budget, payment, grant and contract data publicly available, providing the public with a level of transparency never before seen — into federal agencies. She looks at this as a way for the government to change its thinking when it delivers citizen-facing services.

“It’s back to change management, how we think about changing our work,” she said. “Data is a smarter, faster, more efficient way that we could do our jobs, achieve outcomes, make connections and be more effective.”

Damon Davis, director of the Health Data Initiative for the Department of Health and Human Services, said he’s seen his department and the public find ways to harness HHS data. He highlighted examples like the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Hospital Compare, which allows people to gather information on the quality of care at more than 4,000 Medicare-certified hospitals, as well as others that target underserved populations where people have to choose between health care, food and utility bills.

Davis said more projects like this, whether created inside or outside the agency, allow HHS to justify better and more in-depth projects tied to the release of more data.

“That ends up being the fodder for us to go back internally and go ‘This is why [a project] was a good idea,'” he said. “These are reasons we need to continue to open up these data sources.”

Dan Morgan, chief data officer for the Transportation Department, said tapping government data doesn’t mean using the newest technology. He pointed to a phone line in Harlan County, Kentucky, that uses Mine Safety and Health Administration data so miners can check before they go to work if coal mines have been flagged for hazardous conditions. This phone number was set up in part because the county’s residents still mostly depend on landline phone service for communications.

“It doesn’t have to be a fancy app,” Morgan said. “It doesn’t have to be a cool Internet-connected situation. It can be as simple as a phone number to get information in the hands of somebody who is trying to protect their livelihood.”

Lee echoed Morgan’s sentiments, saying technology is just one facet of what makes open data so powerful for the federal government.

“It’s not about technology,” she said. “Data is about using technology to drive human connections that have been siloed because we are so specialized in our areas of focus. The opportunity that we see from a federal governmentwide perspective is how to put this data in a way that is consumable.”

Government, retail get low cybersecurity marks in survey

Many Americans have lost confidence in the ability of the nation’s largest institutions — government agencies, retail outlets and telecommunications providers — to protect their personal data from compromise, according to a new survey by Unisys Corp.

From the massive 2013 credit card breach at Target to the recent compromise at the federal Office of Personnel Management — perhaps the largest and most significant data breach in the history of government — an increasing number of Americans feel it is likely that the personal data collected and stored by the government and retail outlets will be compromised in the next 12 months.

“Concern about unauthorized access in retail is high, as consumers seem to be less trusting of retailers owing to recent high profile data breaches at several retail chains,” the Unisys Security Insights survey states. “The perceived threat of a data breach in the next 12 months is also relatively high among government agencies, most likely a result of recently reported cyberattacks.”

Although hackers continue to target banks and health care organizations, the perceived threat of data breaches in those sectors is low, possibly reflecting traditional high levels of trust in the security of these organizations, according to Unisys.

“Organizations that hold consumers’ personal data have a major challenge maintaining public confidence that they safely protect private information,” Dave Frymier, vice president and chief information security officer at Unisys, said. “While hackers will always find their way into an organization’s network, enterprises can protect high-value data through basic precautions like patching and sharing threat intelligence as well as using advanced security technologies like micro-segmentation.”

According to Unisys, the traditional mechanisms to protect sensitive personal data against advanced attacks are proving to be insufficient, leading to a significant erosion of trust. To regain the trust of consumers, Unisys recommends government, retail and telecom organizations enlist the following approaches to improve security:

• Converged physical and logical security approach — As logical and physical security measures are converging, leading enterprises across the world should seek ways to solve critical challenges at the point of convergence. Such measures help integrate sensors, consolidate data, provide central or dispersed command and control, use the identity information and support real time as well as offline analytics. Converged security provides seamless monitoring from the door to the desk and to the data.
• Biometrics for superior authentication — A robust security strategy incorporates multifactor authentication methods that provide assurance. The authentication can be provided via various biometric techniques like face recognition, DNA matching, fingerprints, voice recognition and vein structure in hands. Like organizations, mobile devices too allow for advanced authentication techniques to prevent intrusions and information theft. The opportunity for organizations is to grow in tandem with consumer preferences while ensuring highest levels of protection.
• Isolation and compartmentalization for data protection — Protecting sensitive information from unauthorized access is the core objective for any security strategy. This typically involves two key activities of identifying the scope of data protection task, and isolating the people, processes and technologies that interact with the sensitive data. Data isolation is achieved by using access controls and encryption to ensure only authorized systems and users can access sensitive information. In addition, compartmentalization of user groups also results in minimizing the threat.
• Comprehensive security strategy — Maintaining superior security monitoring, awareness and reporting capabilities within a holistic cybersecurity framework helps protect data and networks from internal and external threats. An all-encompassing security strategy would encompass predictive, preventive, detective and retrospective capabilities.

Health care alpha geeks, makers and the new HHS CTO

New Department of Health and Human Services Chief Technology Officer Susannah Fox has quite a legacy to live up to.

HHS’ first CTO Todd Park sparked the movement behind open health data. For Bryan Sivak, Park’s successor, his definiting work was championing innovative entrepreneurship and breaking bureaucracy with the IDEA Lab, a model picking up attention around government.

But just weeks into the job, Fox has an idea of how she can to put a lasting touch on the position: merging the maker movement with the world of health care to solve novel health problems on a large scale.

Fox, who made her name in health care most recently as the entrepreneur-in-residence at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, caught up with FedScoop in her new office within the HHS IDEA Lab to outline her plans as the new CTO. While she spoke highly of the work of her predecessors and plans to continue their work, Fox couldn’t wait to talk about her “obsession” with sourcing the creativity of people living with rare or life-changing diseases to help others with similar illnesses.

It’s those people, often battling diseases without a community of support, who are the “alpha geeks” of health care, Fox said. Because their conditions aren’t widespread, they must often hack their own devices or solutions for care. She said they are “hacking the system in a way that you never would expect. If you follow them, you can really see the future of health care.”

“They would often come up against a problem in their lives that they couldn’t solve — so they would make something,” the CTO said. That something, she said, could be a device, a process or even an application — anything innovative, really.

Fox first became interested in people living with life-changing diagnoses while working with the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which later became a division of the Pew Research Center. The most common trait she found among those affected by illnesses like cancer, HIV and ALS was their desire to connect with other people like them.

Upon building small communities, these health care alpha geeks would happily share what they’ve built or learned to help others. At HHS, Fox wants to tap into that and unite it with the advances in production seen in maker communities.

“There are hundreds of people who are hacking health … creating these one-off solutions that could have an audience if there was a way to unlock and unleash the potential of introducing the maker community to the community that needs these inventions and hacks,” she said. “That’s where I’m pointing ahead and saying ‘What are the possibilities? What can health care learn from makers?'”

And the benefits of a growing community of makers don’t just apply to solving problems among people with rare diseases, or even just health care. The development of technology like 3-D printing and other manufacturing hardware makes it easier to turn an idea into something tangible for citizens and government alike.

“Just as we saw computer and capacity get smaller and cheaper — Moore’s Law — we’re going to see that with manufacturing,” Fox said. “We’re going to see the possibility of amazing solutions coming from citizens as well as from government.”

Already, Fox said, this concept is taking shape in pockets around HHS. The National Institutes of Health is piloting what it called the 3-D Print Exchange, “an open, comprehensive, and interactive website for searching, browsing, downloading, and sharing biomedical 3-D print files, modeling tutorials, and educational material,” according to the website.

That project was honored recently as one of HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell’s favorites during the annual HHS Innovates Awards, which recognizes the innovative work within the department. As the new CTO, and thus the de facto head of the HHS IDEA Lab, Fox said she will continue to spotlight that sort of internal innovative excellence, hoping it will continue to spread into the corners of the department and its component agencies.

“My vision of this job is to throw a spotlight on people who are creating innovative solutions to problems,” she said. “Sometimes it’s going to be technology, and sometimes it’s not.”

NGA embarks on ‘odyssey’ toward a transparent future

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency hopes to throw off the shroud of secrecy that has become a stigma of the U.S. intelligence community through open-sourcing, publicizing data and moving to the cloud, according to a new strategy report released in late June.

A product of the cold-war era, the NGA has often lived up to its reputation of intrigue and clandestine operation, admitted Director Robert Cardillo at 2015 U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Forum GEOINT Symposium June 23rd in Washington, D.C.

“For decades, intelligence was like a regulated currency. We guarded it jealously. We controlled it tightly,” Cardillo said. “As a currency, hoarding is a good thing. That’s clearly what we did and still do to a large degree, to great advantage, because old power was and is still useful. But in today’s world, our enterprise must operate differently: Less like a currency and more like a current.”

For the NGA, the “current” has led to data transparency.

As the need for geospatial imaging in climate, oceanographic and GPS projects intensifies, so too does the pressure on agencies with access to extensive satellite networks. Geospatial data can be incredibly useful for tracking changes in vegetation over certain periods; geo-linking, a process by which addresses are linked to latitudes and longitudes; and plotting weather patterns, among other things.

“You have to consider the kinds of niches that can be derived from open sources,” said Chris Rasmussen, an NGA project lead. “You have to stay open source to stay relevant.”

Landsat, a 40-year-old program jointly founded by NASA and the United States Geological Survey that falls under the NGA domain, is considered the gold standard in natural resources satellite imagery. Because of the high-definition nature of much of Landsat’s data, however, acquiring and storing it can be expensive and time consuming. Analyzing the data poses an even larger challenge.

The NGA has begun to ameliorate these difficulties by transferring up to one petabyte of Landsat data into the cloud, which offers enhanced organization and easier access. About 170,000 Landsat scenes are currently publicly available, with another 700 added each day. Since the program’s March 19 launch, it has experienced 270 million hits from 147 countries and transfers an average of 19 TB of data daily.

Geospatial data has also become a critical element in disaster relief and response, a point which was emphasized during the 2014 Liberian Ebola epidemic. Team GEOINT — an NGA-spearheaded conglomerate of government, industry, academia and international partners collaborating towards more thorough, timely geospatial data — was able to compile and release satellite imagery publicly on the Web. This allowed health care responders to isolate outbreaks and effectively place treatment centers.

“That time-saving led to life-saving,” Cardillo said.

It also prompted the agency and Team GEOINT to incorporate disaster response into its modus operandi moving forward.

NGA was tested once again in the aftermath of the April 2015 Nepal earthquakes, which caused roughly $5 billion in damage and killed more than 9,000 people, including 19 climbers on Mount Everest.

Within the first 24 hours, the initial response team, comprised of the NGA and its GEOINT allies, created an open Web portal with atlases of the cities affected, enabling responders to assess damage and prioritize the search for survivors. Collaborators included U.S. Pacific Command, Transportation Command, the 3rd Marine Expeditionary Force and the State Department, as well as the United Kingdom and Canada.

“[GEOINT] uses skills and collective power to advance our craft, extend capabilities, and connect the community of practitioners through continual, informed and ongoing contributions, [and] flexible, open data-sharing arrangements,” Cardillo said. “It finds innovations, inventions and methodologies to benefit the rest of the team.”

The availability of GEOINT data has also been a major driver in software development. The NGA has made a bounty of data available on Github, an online open source software collaborative. It recently released an app called Disconnected Interactive Content Explorer, or DICE, which allows users to access maps offline after an initial download.

“We were the first agency to have an app,” Rasmussen said. “It used to take hours [to access the data], and now it takes minutes.”

The success of GEOINT is central to the success of NGA, Cardillo said. “NGA cannot do it alone. NGA will not do it alone. So we must leverage the collective strength of the team, to not only determine the patterns of normalcy, but also to develop the technical solutions and smartly employ all the data that’s already at our fingertips.”

In his closing comments, Cardillo addressed his partners directly, underlining the importance of cooperation towards their shared goals in this epic undertaking.

“As you look to the future and your role on Team GEOINT, please think big. And know that to really achieve our potential, we need to take some risks as partners,” he said. “But we need you to take some risks as well, to strive for something big on this joint odyssey.”