The Small Business Administration has had some stumbles in launching systems to disburse funds from the CARES Act and other relief programs. For example, one portal hosted at SBA couldn’t handle the traffic after the PPP loans were announced, but recovered after the agency rebuilt the platform as a cloud service. Since then, SBA has found some of the security capabilities of their cloud-based systems performing unexpectedly well: when they enabled measures to identity and prevent overseas parties to apply for relief loans, the alerts “went off like a Christmas tree,” the agency noted. In this system, machine-learning technology flags unusual activity in real time for SBA analysts to investigate and block.
