This week, I am following up on developments surrounding some of the ideas I put forth in two of my previous NextGov columns: the one I wrote just two weeks ago, and the first one that I officially penned for the magazine back in 2015. Ironically, the one I wrote last time is getting a happy ending of sorts, with government stepping up to embrace an innovative technology. But as for the other item, we find the government still lagging, and in danger of losing a critical piece of technology infrastructure through inaction.
For part one of this column, I was contacted by officials from TrustWave Government solutions, who read NextGov’s Emerging Tech last time where I recommend treat hunting as a service for government, since the concept worked so well in Canada. It turns out, TrustWave is launching a service like this for government this week, and already has some highly interested agencies. That’s the good news.
On the flipside, we find a scathing GAO report that warns that the nation’s GPS system, relied on by both the military and many civilian industries, is in danger of collapse. This is exactly what I warned could happen back in 2015, but everyone told me not to worry. Now the Air Force is rushing to deploy six satellites before the ones in the existing network begin to collapse. Even if the new satellites get to space in time, the supporting ground-based infrastructure for the new GPS III system isn’t working yet, and both the Army and Air Force are scrambling to make backup systems.
Suffice to say, GPS is in trouble, more so than most people would like to admit. Given that the satellites are expected to fail around June of 2021, already past their designed lifetime by over a year at that point, the clock is ticking.
Read the entire column, exclusively in NextGov Magazine.