Come and be the first to hear about the Army’s newest acquisition pilot from Matthew Picerno, ASA(ALT) Chief Cyber Acquisition Officer: Next-Gen Commercial Operations in Defended Enclaves (N-CODE). Worked in association with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology, N-CODE will combine commercial cloud technology with enhanced security features to provide a secure environment for DOD small business contracts to process, store and communicate sensitive data. Small business contracts that opt into the N-CODE pilot can leverage an initial set of productivity tools within a secure environment that will meet a majority of the CMMC controls; this will provide an affordable path to secure data. The Army pilot was built on an initial proof of concept demonstrated in fiscal 2024, with support from across the Army. In the coming months, N-CODE will be available for small businesses DoD contracts. We will also discuss the standard which is the subject of the pilot, the DFARS 252.204-7012 which requires contracts which have to duty to protect DoD Controlled Unclassified Information to implement the cybersecurity standard NIST SP 800-171. The DoD IG has several reports about how this implementation is going. Let’s talk about NIST SP 800-171. Let’s learn how it’s accomplished and questions the contracting team can ask to know if contract cybersecurity is on-track and protecting DoD data.
