Powering Secure Federal R&D Collaboration with Box

Posted on by Wyn Elder

The federal government funds about 22% of US research and development (R&D), with $708 billion spent in 2020 alone.

It’s an enormous — and critical— expense, driving innovation across dozens of industries, economic growth, breakthroughs, and even scientific discoveries. And the effective exchange of ideas between researchers across academic fields and disciplines is what makes it all possible.

Research areas like renewable energy, national defense, transportation, communication, and the environment are intrinsic to US security and prosperity. That leaves no time for outdated software, poor R&D collaboration practices and unreliable budget allocations.

Box Powering Secure R&D Collaboration Blog Embedded Image 2022

You need real-time, secure collaboration inside and outside organizations — across research teams, universities and industries. With the Content Cloud, federal agencies get a secure, digital content platform to share and edit documents, presentations, spreadsheets and other unstructured content in real time. Box brings teams together – both inside and outside the agency – with a secure content layer for unstructured data across every application.

Moving beyond storage solutions to a content platform

Many agencies are in different stages of their cloud journey and use different technologies such as Microsoft Office 365, Google, or single task software applications to perform similar tasks. Researchers, when faced with ineffective tools, often download unsanctioned file-sharing collaboration platforms to compensate in order to get their jobs done.

Box gives you a standardized platform to streamline and secure file sharing and settle on a true content strategy. With end users in mind, Box creates a seamless, easy-to-use environment that deploys quickly, so teams achieve their missions

Secure external collaboration

Before Box, teams lacked secure, compliant, and intuitive content collaboration tools. Agency employees resorted to legacy file transfer protocol (FTP) sites, email, USB, and other unsecured tools to share information.

That’s all changing. Box holds strong partnerships in the National Lab community to foster a productive R&D environment through a secure, user-friendly, standardized and governed platform. Working with organizations like the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Institute of Health (NIH), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), NASA, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and the Department of Defense (DoD), Box has improved workflows, created custom portals, streamlined external collaboration, and provided built-in, e-signature capabilities.

Securely connect your content across 1,500+ apps

For agency administrators, Box brings real-time control and visibility to the back end for auditing and reporting on all actions across the enterprise for IT organizations. Box comes standard with over 1,500 integrations, connectable through prebuilt APIs or development frameworks. An average government agency utilizes approximately 200 different software applications, all of which host data within their own silos, creating a chaotic and fragmented content problem for researchers. Agencies that move to the Content Cloud easily integrate these applications for seamless research experiences.

How the FDA leverages Box for secure collaboration

Box has partnered with the FDA since 2017, focusing on secure external data sharing and collaboration with different industry partners, medical institutions, and academic research universities across all FDA mission areas. During COVID, we saw a large uptick in Box usage as agencies transitioned to remote work. Box enabled secure data sharing between consumer safety officers and medical facilities to help support remote safety inspections for the Office of Regulatory Affairs.

How Box enables the NIH to securely share research

The National Institute of Health (NIH) and Box have partnered together for over seven years. Box is used extensively across all research teams and all 27 institutes and centers. Like many government and commercial organizations, the NIH faced remote work challenges. Our platform expedited its secure data sharing and external collaboration with academia and different research institutions for critical biomedical research. The ease of use (and the ability to support different types of content) allows researchers to view, share and edit reports and images. The IT team at NIH leverages our granular security and access controls, along with daily audits and reports about Box user activity.

NASA and Box elevate work with the Content Cloud

After a security sweep across its network, NASA found many unauthorized file sharing services and poor file sharing practices across its teams. To improve R&D collaboration security, in seeking solutions with strong security posture, the organization narrowed its search to a few vendors that included Box. Box then launched a pilot with NASA with a small group of users to secure its platform through the Authorization to Operate (ATO) process with NASA security teams to ensure all controls and standards in the Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) were achieved. After receiving positive feedback from its customer base and researchers, Box was adopted across NASA, which allowed them to examine and secure their network. Box is now the only collaboration platform approved for NASA employees to handle ITAR data.

Download Box’s Tech Spotlight , “Streamlining Secure Federal Research and Development Collaboration,” to learn about our secure digital content platform and data sharing best practices.

The Best of What’s New in Cybersecurity

Posted on by The Carahsoft Team

In November 2021, federal lawmakers approved dedicated funding for state and local government cybersecurity efforts. The new State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program — included in the massive Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — provides $1 billion for cybersecurity improvements over four years. Then, in March of this year, President Biden signed into law the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act of 2022 as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2022. Taken together, these laws point toward significant changes in the nation’s historically decentralized approach to cybersecurity. New cybersecurity legislation is being driven by a threat environment that seemingly grows more menacing by the day. It’s likely that state and local agencies will receive additional federal cybersecurity support going forward, along with greater federal oversight. Learn how your agency or municipality can take full advantage of the increased funding to protect against increasing challenges in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Government® report.

Navigating Security in a Fast-Changing Environment

“Threat actors are constantly devising new attacks and methodologies, so organizations must stay on top of trends and constantly evolve how they build and secure their software supply chain. It isn’t a ‘set it once and you’re good’ kind of thing. President Biden’s executive order on improving the nation’s cybersecurity and some bills going through Congress will help address some of the issues. Among many things, the executive order mandates service providers disclose security incidents or attacks. It’s also important to establish a community where security professionals across the nation can exchange security and threat information. You don’t want to solve these things in a vacuum. We’re stronger as a community than as individual organizations.”

Read more insights from SolarWinds’ Group Vice President of Product, Brandon Shopp.

User Identities in a Zero-Trust World

“State and local governments — which have become top targets of phishing, data breaches and ransomware attacks — must be able to prevent cybercriminals from accessing all endpoints, including those associated with a distributed workforce. Prior to the pandemic, employees primarily accessed databases, applications and constituent data from within the secured network perimeter of an office. Now users are connecting from their home networks or unknown networks — even cafes — that don’t have the security protections that exist within a physical office. That heightens the need for Zero Trust, which has ‘never trust, always verify’ as a main tenet.”

Read more insights from Keeper Security’s Director of Public Sector Marketing, Hanna Wong.

Secure Collaboration for the Work-from-Anywhere Future

“The first step is to look at your content governance model. What does that content life cycle look like from ingestion or creation to consumption and archive? Compliance must be part of that entire process. Then, it comes down to your platform and tools. Are you selecting a platform like Box, where your entire content repository is unified and ensures compliance from the point of entry to the point of disposition — all while offering a seamless user experience? Or are you signing up for a disparate and disconnected strategy where you are now responsible for tracking and making sure that different data sources are compliant? Content fragmentation, even in the cloud, can introduce unnecessary exposure and a compliance risk.”

Read more insights from Box’s Managing Director for State and Local Government, Murtaza Masood.

What High-Performing Security Organizations Do Differently

“State and local governments are still trying to get a handle on remote access. At the beginning of COVID, most agencies didn’t have a 1:1 ratio of devices to send home with people, so they were forced overnight into a bring-your-own-device support model and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) implementation. In many cases, the VDI implementation wasn’t very secure, nor was it optimal. Now agencies are asking how secure their setup is, and they have to go backward to address that, which can cause some real challenges.”

Read more insights from HPE’s Master Technologist in the Company’s Office of North America CTO, Joe Vidal, and Server Security and Management Solutions Business Manager, Allen Whipple.

Download the full Innovation in Government® report for more insights from these cybersecurity thought leaders and additional industry research from GovTech.

Normalizing Innovation: Lessons from State and Local Leaders

Posted on by The Carahsoft Team

Think about the past 18 to 20 months. Many facets of our lives were (and still are) in flux. The same is true for municipalities, school districts, counties and states. Pandemic-related responses stretched public servants beyond their job descriptions, and they showed up: creating life-saving workarounds for the public; cutting through bureaucratic red tape to streamline benefits; rethinking how to serve constituents in need; launching digital tools and services to empower employees and the public in new ways; and more. This guide provides use cases and practical tips for ensuring that the progress made during the pandemic sticks. In conversation, innovation and technology intertwine, but technology alone isn’t innovation. True innovation gets to the heart of how governments use tech to improve outcomes, save lives and empower employees to serve at their best. Download the guide to read more about how agencies at the state and local levels are advancing with the latest technology.

3 Things You Can Do Now to Rethink Innovation

“Innovation came in waves in the past 18 months. It started with agencies having to reinforce technology’s critical role in their daily operations. ‘I think the second wave of innovation is realizing the opportunity to work differently,’ said Kevin Tunks, National Technology Adviser for State and Local Government at Red Hat, a leader in enterprise open source software innovation. Red Hat is a proponent of using human-centered design to shape positive employee interactions with technologies and impactful customer experiences with government services. ‘I think this pandemic forced everybody to step off the treadmill collectively and rethink how we want to go forward,’ Tunks said. But what does that look like in practice?”

Read more insights from Red Hat’s National Technology Adviser for State and Local Government, Kevin Tunks.

Is Your Relationship With Data Helping or Hurting Innovation?

“Your data has a time value, whether you’ve explicitly acknowledged it or not. ‘What we’ve seen at the forefront is this concept of needing to have readily available, reliable data for critical decision-making,’ said Matt Walk, Director of State/Local Government for the Eastern U.S. at Snowflake, a data platform provider. Although states have focused on modernizing their systems for years, the pandemic created a sense of urgency. It reinforced that the stakes are much higher in terms of the ability to quickly access data to make critical decisions, Walk said. This is especially true as states transition from responding to the pandemic to recovering from it. The success of these efforts depends on the extent to which states eliminate silos and embrace a more data-driven, enterprise-focused approach to governing.”

Read more insights from Snowflake’s Director of State/Local Government for the Eastern U.S., Matt Walk.

Why Innovation Must Account for the Identity Factor

“The reach of government services hinges on recipients’ ability to prove that they are who they claim to be. However, with the adoption of social distancing practices, the once routine transaction of identification became a logistical and security headache for many agencies. This adjustment particularly impacted departments of motor vehicles and heavily paper-based agencies that had not embraced digital transformation. Then the pandemic hit. Not only were many agencies scrambling to prove identities for large swaths of employees needing remote access to administer government services and benefits, but they also had to provide the same electronic services to the public in need of those services. Embracing the changes was an example of breakthrough innovation for agencies that were forced to adapt. But what can leaders do to sustain and build on this progress?

Read more insights from BeyondTrust’s Chief Security Officer, Morey Haber.

3 Ways to Embed Innovation in Your IT Roadmap

“Remote employees may be sharing Wi-Fi with non-government employees on their home networks. Are agencies prepared to address ongoing challenges with security risks and network performance issues as employees compete for bandwidth when working remotely? Among the drivers is the president’s cybersecurity executive order that calls for adopting a zero-trust security model, where implicit trust of any device, node or user is replaced with continuous verification. The mandate is for federal agencies, but the trickle-down impact will affect state and local governments, too.”

Read more insights from SolarWinds’ CISO Tim Brown.

How to Support Lasting and Agile Transformation

“Innovation isn’t typically associated with citizen-facing government services, such as state toll roads, some transit authorities or even public school systems. That’s changing, though, as more governments embrace transformation as a continuous and holistic evolution — backed by formal strategy, dedicated funding, clear roles and expertise. Dick Stark, President of RightStar, an Atlassian verified Government Partner and IT service management provider, has seen these truths unfold across agencies as they embrace Agile and DevOps methods. Take the New Jersey Turnpike Authority, which operates two of the busiest toll roads in the country, for instance. By partnering with RightStar, the agency modernized and consolidated its IT operations, including service incidents and asset management, and tracking functions outside IT, such as intelligent device signage and cameras.”

Read more insights from RightStar’s President, Dick Stark.

How to Make State and Local Innovation Last

“The COVID-19 pandemic revealed a hard truth – state and local governments cannot always meet the public’s needs in person. To adapt, many agencies had to deliver their products and services digitally for the first time. How can agencies sustain this innovation permanently? With more public-sector workforces mixing onsite and remote employees while addressing public preferences, this question’s relevance grows daily. Cloud content management can become a strong component of lasting innovation. Using cloud computing’s decentralized IT, agencies can access computing resources such as data storage on demand. Ultimately, this power can help agencies create innovative digital workflows that serve constituents wherever they are.”