Top Upcoming 5G Events for Government to Attend

Posted on by Mark DeMerse

Secure Public Sector networks with 5G wireless technology delivers high-speed wireless connectivity, faster data rates and lower latency for systems and communities across the nation. This next-generation mobile network enables the expansion of virtual reality (VR) and the Internet of Things (IoT) solutions. While many successful use cases have recently emerged showcasing the power of 5G in Government, Carahsoft partners are supporting agencies by providing powerful cellular networks and maintaining reliable mobile connections to achieve mission success without compromising security within workflows.

Explore more ways to leverage Carahsoft and our partners through our various upcoming Government events. Learn about acceleration of real-time delivery from devices, increased adoption of AI and multiaccess edge computing technologies (MEC) and other innovations from leading 5G technology service providers.

5G Summit

August 22 | Reston, VA

5G networks have become more common over the past few years. One study found that 5G’s worldwide share of mobile data traffic in 2021 was about 10% – but expected to grow to 60% by 2027. Government agencies are more selective when it comes to adopting 5G for their networks, partially due to higher costs associated with deploying such networks as well as unique requirements very large organizations such as the Department of Defense pose. Join thought leaders from Government and industry as they outline developments in 5G network rollouts at agencies and the ways 5G can be harnessed to open new opportunities to meet agencies’ various missions.

Sessions to look out for:

5G is at the Heart of CJADC2

5G’s Role in Modernization

The Future of 5G Technology in Government

Carahsoft is hosting this year’s 5G Summit alongside FedInsider, Cradlepoint, Nokia, Intel, T-Mobile, and Dell Technologies providing the latest management news from inside the Government.

T-Mobile Tech Experience: 5G Hub

August 27 | Bellevue, WA

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Inaugurated in 2016, the Tech Experience has set out to create innovative and engaging experiences to inspire the industry to turn concepts into tangible, transformative solutions. The T-Mobile 5G Hub offers opportunities to meet with engineers, immerse in technology demonstrations and gain other valuable resources. At the event, hear directly from project partners about the successful projects crafted within the 5G Hub, explore video testimonials showcasing T-Mobile’s facilities, technology, expertise and partnerships, and get ready to participate in ample networking sessions.

Carahsoft partners AWS, Dell Technologies, Nokia, Ericsson, Microsoft, Google Cloud and Qualcomm will be featured at the 2024 T-Mobile Tech Experience.

ATARC Federal Mobility Summit

September 19 | Reston, VA

ATARC, the Advanced Technology Academic Research Center, and Carahsoft invite attendees to a day full of networking, innovation and collaboration within the world of federal mobility. At the Federal Mobility Summit, industry experts and leaders in Government will explore the latest trends and updates in mobile technology such as security, Zero Trust, acquisition, best practices and emerging solutions. Connect with peers and gain valuable insights into the future of mobility in the federal sector.

Sessions to look out for:

Securing Mobile Technologies: Identity, Zero Trust, and Threats

Navigating Mobile Acquisitions: Strategies and Best Practices

Next-Generation Networks: 5G, 6G, and Their Impact

Mission Enablement: Tools and Technologies for Success

Carahsoft is proud to host the Federal Mobility Summit at our office in Reston, Virginia and holds an ATARC membership, immersing further into the Federal IT community.

Open RAN GLOBAL FORUM

September 24 | Virtual

Open RAN, or Open Radio Access Network, is an evolving shift of industry standards and mobile architecture so that service providers can use equipment from multiple vendors while ensuring interoperability. The Open RAN Global Forum brings industry experts and Government together to delve into the latest updates for Open RAN including the role Open RAN will play in 6G, focusing on energy-efficient, AI-driven and customizable technology. Featuring interviews, live discussions and demos, attendees will learn more about adoption challenges and progress surrounding tier-one telecom operators’ roadmaps. Other key themes featured at this year’s event include examining the growth of AI and automation in RIC, exploring Open RAN economics and capitalization opportunities, testing and reducing energy consumption and more.

Carahsoft partners and mobile carries Verizon and T-Mobile will be featured at Open RAN GLOBAL FORUM.

Mobile World Congress

October 8-10 | Las Vegas, Nevada

Prepare for the new era of hyperconnected business and smart cities or procure technology that can be deployed right now to make legacy systems and existing processes faster, easier and more resilient with industrial-grade 5G. At Mobile World Congress, explore technology themes like enterprise transformation, AI networks and 5G EdgeCloud with 5G leaders, architects and systems integrators, as well as CIOs from successful 5G enterprises, and discover how this technology can solve today’s biggest industry challenges.

Carahsoft partners Verizon, Qualcomm and Microsoft will be featured at this year’s MWC.

5G Round Table Webinar Series

October 3 & November 14 | Virtual

This fall, join us for two 5G Round Table sessions featuring real-world insights from Intel and T-Mobile. Hear from thought leaders from Government and industry outlining developments in 5G network rollouts at agencies and the ways 5G can be harnessed to open new opportunities to meet agencies’ unique missions.

Carahsoft will be hosting this event alongside FedInsider. CPE credits will be provided for qualified participants.

AutoCon 2

November 18-22 | Denver, CO

Full adoption of network automation is a continuous challenge for the mobility community that innovators at AUTOCON 2 hope to discover a solution for. The first, single, in-person event was a foundational moment for collaborators to advance the state of automated network operations. Now, the founders of the event are working to grow AutoCon into a recurring series of practitioner-focused events. This fall’s event will feature informational conference sessions, workshops and networking opportunities.

Carahsoft partners Nokia and Arista will be featured at AUTOCON 2.

Carahsoft’s 5G Podcast Series

Multiple Events | Virtual

Carahsoft’s podcast series dives into the world of 5G technology solutions, featuring expert insights from industry leaders. Explore sessions on the strategic advantages and key technologies for 5G, relevant applications of 5G for Federal, State and Local Governments and specific agency use cases such as the transformative success stories, learning curves and future objectives of 5G for the Department of Defense. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to impact the power and possibilities of 5G technology.

To learn more or get involved in any of the above events please contact us at 5G@carahsoft.com. For more information on Carahsoft and our industry leading Cybersecurity technology partners’ events, visit our 5G Solutions Portfolio and 5G Events page. 

Enabling the Mobile Workforce With Secure Forms and Electronic Signatures

Posted on by Pat Pulliam and Noah Campbell

In this era of a largely remote and globally distributed workforce, where most workers want to be productive wherever they are — and on any device — it’s crucial to secure every endpoint from any threat that could compromise the security, prosperity, and integrity of an organization and its critical infrastructure. This is particularly true for governments and regulated industries.

Secure Forms for Productivity and Security

Forms are essential to all organizations, as they are a part of all important business processes, and a vital element of the customer journey. Forms are essential to collect information, progress the next best action, and deliver services. As with any heavily relied-on technology, forms’ security must be top of mind. Traditionally, the answer to this demand has been to gate our most mission-critical forms and documents behind cumbersome desktop technology. In this way, stakeholders had peace of mind that the verification of signature authenticity, and document chain-of-custody, could be protected and maintained.

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However, today’s workforce demands more options. Modern technology enables forms, and their connected digital document workflows, to deliver an optimized and personalized experience for the user — all while maintaining strong authentication, privacy, security, and adherence to data governance policies. As organizations continue to accommodate increasingly complex models for remote productivity, digital document workflows must flex with the times. They must be designed, deployed, and dispatched using intuitive interfaces and automation, across a wide range of mobile devices.

BlackBerry and Adobe: Innovation for Secure Mobile Productivity

To accomplish this forms maturity journey, BlackBerry and Adobe have partnered to deliver an innovative and secure digital document-signing solution, for governments and regulated industries. By combining BlackBerry Unified Endpoint Manager (UEM) and Adobe Experience Manager Forms, the two industry leaders have created a solution that is designed for mobile devices, yet still meets the rigorous security standards required by governments and the world’s most demanding enterprises.

This partnership between BlackBerry and Adobe enables the following outcomes:

It’s now possible to fill and sign forms with a smart card (i.e., CAC, PIV) easily and securely, from any device, anywhere, without requiring a VPN (virtual private network)
Automatically maintain verified credentials in a secure keystore
Granular management and document tracking capabilities are backed by the most trusted and reliable security in the market
Employees can leave sensitive desktop computing technology behind, at home or the office, minimizing security risks while enhancing user convenience

BlackBerry UEM leverages private key certificates to secure the connection to Adobe Experience Manager Forms, allowing employees to complete and sign forms and other documents from anywhere, on their corporate-issued or BYO (bring your own) mobile devices, and without a VPN.

Leveraging Security as a Strategic Enabler for Productivity

Enhancing productivity requires adopting dynamic, responsive, and mobile-friendly forms solutions that are easy to use. Adobe Experience Manager Forms embraces this, while enabling organizations to modernize their data capture and digital document workflows into a seamless, agile user experience. It allows users to capture data and authenticated signatures, and integrates into back-end systems to automate manual workflows. Adobe Experience Manager Forms also allows users to move away from paper or static PDF forms, while also embracing multiple benefits, including:

Responsive modern forms: Embrace operational modernization with mobile responsive, web-based forms, on any device, at any point in the discovering, filing, and signing process.
Scalable authoring: With the ability to create reusable sections and templates, and an easy drag-and-drop interface, Adobe Experience Manager Forms allows organizations to streamline business processes across the enterprise at scale.
Meaningful customer conversations: Powerful data integrations with pre-fill and multi-language support automatically personalize forms and communications, and trigger the next-best action.
Automation: Adobe Experience Manager Forms enables you to start on one device, then save and resume on another, to make end-to-end customer journeys faster. This reduces cost and saves time. Mobile and web-based forms combined with smart, certificate-based signature tools and automated workflows, help eliminate paper and laborious manual processes.

These outcomes, which have previously been considered out of reach for governments and regulated industries, are made possible by the best-of-breed security, and intuitive user experience, of BlackBerry UEM.

Awarded the most government security certifications of any unified endpoint manager, and approved for both classified and unclassified use, BlackBerry UEM is trusted by organizations around the world. Customers that trust BlackBerry UEM to keep them always-on, and securely connected, include the federal governments of numerous countries around the world, including the Canadian and U.S. governments, and many of the largest and most prestigious players in the global financial services industry. Announced earlier this year, BlackBerry UEM was named a 2023 Customers’ Choice for unified endpoint management tools on Gartner® Peer Insights™ — the only UEM tool to receive the distinction this year.

Digital document workflows should not be limited to desktop environments. Business value can no longer be delayed or denied by lack of mobile support for securely completing and signing electronic documents. Productivity must not come at the cost of security. The innovative partnership between BlackBerry and Adobe holds the answer.

Contact a member of our team today to learn more about how, together, BlackBerry and Adobe can help modernize your organization with the most secure forms and electronic signature technologies.

The 4 Latest Technology Trends in Law Enforcement

Posted on by GovWhitePapers, GovEvents

In the last few decades technology and digital services have grown exponentially, becoming more automated, advanced and often accurate. Now, law enforcement agencies are continuously learning how to adapt their outdated technologies to fight crime in the cyber and physical world. To better provide public safety, agencies should focus their efforts in four main areas: manage data, secure investment, ensure mobile accessibility and remain transparent. With these trends in mind, the law enforcement community can begin understanding the best ways to use technology against criminals.

1) Manage Data

As cybercrime increases, law enforcement agencies continue to be a significant target for bad actors looking to claim the extremely high value data these organizations hold—data that is personal and could even be life altering. Within data security and management, there are three vital categories to consider.

Protecting and storing sensitive data: The amount of cyber data held by law enforcement is unfathomable and keeping it secure is of utmost importance. With large amounts of surveillance such as body camera video and patrol car data, third-party tech companies must step in to provide support in storage capacity. Cloud solutions and centralization of data is making it easier for law enforcement to securely store, manage and access data versus external drives that can be stolen or broken.
Digital evidence as a part of every case: All digital evidence from victims and suspects needs to be managed for future use in trials, but as the amount of evidence that needs to be stored grows, crime labs simply cannot keep up. To combat this, processes are being put into place that allow officers to collect the most important evidence from devices during the initial investigation and allowing victims and witnesses to keep them afterward. This way, crime labs will not become overwhelmed and law enforcement can build trust within an investigation.
The relevancy of Artificial Intelligence: AI gives law enforcement the opportunity to work most efficiently by combing through data within a matter of seconds instead of a manual approach that could take weeks or months. With AI doing the harder work, analysts can then make imperative connections within a case much quicker.

2) Secure Investment

While it is obvious law enforcement must transition to more upgraded technology, new devices, software and security measures, these upgrades come with a hefty price tag. Not only do smaller law enforcement organizations have to compete for funding with larger state and local government agencies, but they must also attempt to build their case for funding allocation with data from outdated systems.

However, agencies can still use what they have in order to prove their services are worth the cost. For example, the Seattle Police Department used data from roughly 10,000 cases of mental health crisis to show the scope of support that is needed to create better programs for handling these unique situations.^[1]Other agencies are using Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions to mitigate storage, security and other data issues that are overwhelming legacy systems and the policing staff.

3) Ensure Mobile Accessibility

More funding and better data solutions will not fix the glaring issues of a lack of officer preparedness and willingness to learn new technologies. On the other hand, new processes and tech should help streamline their work such as mobile-first solutions. For example, officers who must still transition to using a smart phone on the job should find it easy as they likely already have a personal smart phone. Additionally, 5G is being widely built to align with law enforcement sectors. Various applications and software should be simple to access and use across any age or level of experience to allow officers to evaluate the more intimate details of a case while technology handles the raw data collection and analyses.

4) Remain Transparent

Transparency within policing has become an increasingly controversial topic, but data ensures factual support to garner trust between law enforcement agencies and the public. Some useful data is crime data, use-of-force data and mental and behavioral health crisis response data. Sharing these through PDFs or records management systems is simple, but new, collaborative data portals provide community members the opportunity to download and analyze data for themselves. There can be discrepancies in data collection, though, such as the use of body cameras and surveillance videos. These create grey areas when it comes to rights regarding digital information collection versus physical evidence.

The Future of Tech in Law Enforcement

The demand for quick and accurate results within law enforcement is rising much faster than the ability for agencies to replace old legacy systems and implement newer, more robust technologies. Organizations must continue to share their experiences to understand what is and is not working among the industry to ultimately improve not only the relationship between law enforcement and their communities, but also efficiency of public safety.

Read the full report by GovWhitePapers featuring real-world examples from Carahsoft’s vendors ADF Solutions, Magnet Forensics, Mark43 and Voyager Labs. For more information on the latest advancements in the Law Enforcement Sector, check out Carahsoft’s Federal, State and Local Law Enforcement Technology solutions.

[1] “6 Challenges Impacting Public Safety & How Agencies are Adjusting,” Mark43, https://mark43.com/resources/blog/6-challenges-impacting-public-safety-how-agencies-are-adjusting/

“Law Enforcement Technology Trends Report,” GovWhitePapers, https://static.carahsoft.com/concrete/files/8116/5956/0644/2022_Law_Enforcement_Technology_Trends_Report.pdf

The Best of What’s New in Mobility

Posted on by The Carahsoft Team

Many organizations have already invested significantly in projects that support mobility. The Center for Digital Government (CDG)’s 2021 Digital Cities and Digital Counties Surveys found that on average 85% of city respondents and 75% of county respondents are using location services, native mobile apps and text message/SMS channels. As organizations move forward with mobility, they should consider compute and storage capacity, end-to-end security, service design and delivery, and application rollout. Another important strategy is to have multiple options, so the organization can adjust to cost changes and inflationary pressures that could impact targeted business outcomes. Learn how your agency or municipality can move toward mobility in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Government® report.

Driving Innovation with Mobility

“It comes down to identity and Zero-Trust concepts. Strongly authenticating someone and having confidence in their identity is especially important as organizations work with sensitive or private information. Organizations need to consider how users move through sensitive data from a strong authentication and authorization standpoint. That brings us to Zero- Trust development models. How do you architect to create a safe landing space for people to come in and then traverse into legacy systems where critical information is stored? How do you set up safe, well-orchestrated and known boundaries, so employees and the public don’t have challenges when they try to access data? That’s critical in your systems.”

Read more insights from Red Hat’s Chief Architect and National Technology Adviser, Kevin Tunks.

Mobilizing Your Enterprise Securely

“The first challenge is education — understanding what mobile app security means; what the risks are; and what tools, techniques and processes should be employed. The second challenge is determining whether to build the program internally or leverage third parties. Setting up your own program and building a security team to do things like continuous testing, penetration testing, security analysis and supply chain risk management is costly and complicated. Most agencies are turning to commercial off-the-shelf packages or managed service providers that scan and vet mobile apps. Doing so provides instant intelligence on what security risks might live in those mobile apps, so organizations can decide whether to allow them.”

Read more insights from NowSecure’s Chief Mobility Officer, Brian Reed.

Addressing Today’s Mobile Threats

“A lot of Zero-Trust conversations today revolve around validating identity and making sure that a person is who they purport to be. However, if their device has a malicious payload when they’re granted network access, then all we’ve really done is identify that they were the source of the attack. We believe that when you validate the person’s identity, you must simultaneously do device attestation to validate the integrity of their device. Only then should the person be granted access to that particular resource or infrastructure. You can’t say you have Zero Trust if you haven’t attested the device. The two go hand-in-hand.”

Read more insights from Zimperium’s Vice President for Public Sector, Jim Kovach.

Moving from Mobile-First to Mobile-Only

“Organizations must secure all devices that process enterprise data. It’s important to look past “industry standard” protections of yesterday and embrace newer technologies that employ AI and machine learning to provide smarter, quicker and lighter-weight ways of protecting assets. In addition, it’s best to implement mobile-first architectures, 5G (as well as the anticipated 6G release) and cloud architectures simultaneously with their non-mobile infrastructure counterparts. Non-negotiables include yearly penetration testing, programs to review and test third-party applications within agency environments, and securing mobile devices as strongly as desktops. It’s also wise to ensure the security posture of cloud environments is equivalent to on-premises environments. Of course, securing data in transit and at rest is essential. Finally, end-to-end security can’t take a back seat to appeasing users’ demands.”

Read more insights from the BlackBerry Sales Engineering team.

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

| Carahsoft

Tag Archives: Mobility