The U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency is beginning a major scrub of user requirements as it proceeds with its new commercial satellite services acquisition process. The communications agency is taking a hard look at thousands of customer requirements to determine the validity of some against the necessity of others.

U.S. Army communicators are focusing on providing key enabling technologies to warfighters who already are exploiting new networking capabilities. The urgencies of warfare, coupled with emerging communications requirements, have mandated that engineers concentrate on the user end of connectivity.

The future of U.S. Army networks is evolving at Fort Bliss, Texas, through the development, testing and exercising of technologies that range from apps to cognitive networks. Though the initiatives are separate efforts, combined field events and close physical proximity are creating synergy between developers. As the work moves forward, successful outcomes will change how soldiers communicate at home and in the field.

The future of the Internet is beginning to take shape as Web 3.0 capabilities become available for everyday lives in both personal and professional capacities. But as technology continues to blaze forward at blinding rates, the opportunities for innovators to affect that future abound. Leaders of major companies agree on some of the trends consumers can expect to experience, but they also have their own ideas about how their organizations will shape, and fit into, the new digital landscape.

The cybercommunity has a new resource at its disposal to identify and mitigate issues across networks and systems. This standardization tool can make reporting problems more uniform, which should result in faster response times. Developers designed an open format that will be machine- and human-readable to automate processes, marking a divergence from standards presented in the past.

Your association continues to move forward in what is proving to be an exciting and dynamic era, and these efforts include personnel changes. In an important step, AFCEA has just added two new members to the executive team who are going to benefit all of you.

Eric DeMarco knows how to cut a wide swath through the Southern California defense community. He just jumps in the corporate car and tools around town.

It is a project that most officials and power industry leaders acknowledge will take 20 to 30 years. But already, government and industry representatives involved in upgrading the United States’ electrical infrastructure to the highly anticipated smart grid are reporting success in developing some of the first standards for the long-term nationwide project.

Whether it is floods in the Midwest United States, earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan, blizzard conditions in Washington, D.C., or hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, one does not have to go far these days to see that natural disasters are becoming a bigger part of life. Nowhere does that reality come into focus more than at the nation’s military bases, where troops face the triple challenge of maintaining a state of readiness prior to disasters, working to serve as recovery resources, and being good neighbors where possible to the local communities they call home.

From the White House, to the Defense Department, and from corporate boardrooms to computer rooms across the country, the issue of protecting the networks of government and industry is increasingly leading to the development of new strategies and plans.