There are few aspects of modern life that haven’t been touched by information technology. One of them is the voting process for U.S. overseas military personnel. For the most part, it’s still done by snail mail. A soldier abroad receives a ballot by mail, marks it manually and returns it by mail.
“We’ve been doing this since the 1860s,” said Paul Lux, supervisor of elections for Okaloosa County in northwest Florida. But that’s in the process of changing. Keep reading →
COMMENTARY – Some lawmakers on Capitol Hill are hell bent on implementing the recommendations of President Barack Obama’s Cyberspace Policy Review, in which the administration argued for a greater role for the Department of Homeland Security in securing the nation’s critical infrastructure from cyber attack.
And to prove how serious and misguided they are, some of these lawmakers like Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) are about to introduce legislation that arguably will hurt innovation and jobs, and which may actually grant the DHS extraordinary regulatory powers that extend to the Internet. Keep reading →
Government agencies are savings billions of dollars from virtualization; and those savings are projected to grow as workloads in virtualized server and desktop environments are expected to double by 2015. But agencies must overcome funding uncertainties, concerns about legacy systems and other barriers to achieve virtualization’s full potential, according to a new industry survey of government IT executives.
The new study found that 82% of federal and 77% of state-and-local IT professionals say their agencies have already implemented some degree of server virtualization, where computing work is done in artificially-created, software-controlled work spaces. Keep reading →
One day early last year, Veterans Affairs Department chief technology officer Peter Levin happened to run into VA Secretary Eric Shinseki.
“He came up to me and said, ‘I hear you’re working on a special project.'” Levin’s project was a tool that would give veterans easy and quick online access to their personal health records. Keep reading →
The Army has entered DISA’s Cloud Computing Purple Zone.
It’s secure. It’s effective. And it is saving the Army $100 million this year alone on enterprise email operating costs, according to Mike Krieger, deputy chief information officer, G-6, U.S. Army. Keep reading →
Back in the 1830s, most Americans lived on farms. Many probably secured their life savings in their trusty mattress. Then a new local bank opens in town promising more security, but has no track record to prove it. People didn’t trust the bank at first; it was new to the area and skeptical farmers felt it was not intrinsically secure.
“Now fast forward to the cloud,” cloud expert and blogger Kevin Jackson said last week as a panelist at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cloud Computing Forum IV. Keep reading →
Although there are many drivers behind the recent explosion of small form factor computing devices in the typical government enterprise environment – including smartphones, tablets, slate and netbook devices, e-readers, and more – perhaps the single most important and under appreciated driver is Microsoft Exchange-based email.
(Full disclosure: Before joining my current employer, I spent nearly 12 years with Microsoft Corp. where I oversaw the company’s strategic and tactical mobile initiatives across the federal government.) Keep reading →
The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Federal CIO Council hosted a conference on the state of mobility in the federal government earlier this week that brought together top-tier industry mobility professionals across the U.S. federal mobile ecosystem to discuss the rapidly evolving adoption of mobile technologies.
For those of us who have been in this industry for many years like myself, the tone of remarks at the two-day conference, held Aug. 23-24, was a welcome return to reality and affirmation that security and data integrity should not be lost in all the recent hype over a new breed of powerful smartphones and tablet computing devices. Keep reading →
COMMENTARY:
With the announcement of Steven VanRoekel as the new Federal Chief Information Officer, many are wondering how the 25-point plan will continue, and what new initiatives will be evaluated as we embark on a new era of IT within the federal government.
Rather than to launch major new initiatives, Steven VanRoekel has already made it known that his main goal during his tenure as Federal CIO is to continue momentum surrounding the programs already in development by his predecessor, Vivek Kundra. Keep reading →