My perspective on the outlook for cyber initiatives is quite different heading into the New Year than in past years.
While there are always budgetary uncertainties and looming cuts in government IT spending, this year, we face an unprecedented financial uncertainty as our nation stands on the edge of a fiscal cliff. That will impact not only the resources we have to invest in technology, but how people work and live. Keep reading →
Healthcare is experiencing an unprecedented transformation.
Motivated by the need to meet new regulatory requirements in the U.S., including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and to receive incentives from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s (ARRA’s) Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) provision, many healthcare providers are investing to modernize their legacy IT infrastructure and clinical applications. In addition to meeting compliance issues, these early adopters are discovering numerous advantages from their investment in IT – not only in cost savings, but also in improved patient care, tightened information security, advanced collaboration, increased transparency and trackability, and ‘connected care.’ Keep reading →
Federal information technology professionals are confronted with a management landscape that is perhaps as complex as any have seen in a generation.
That’s due in part to the convergence of three transformational technologies – cloud computing, mobile devices and big data analytics. The benefits of each technology are generally expected to outweigh many of the associated challenges of implementing them. Keep reading →
Complexity is the name of the game in today’s high-volume identity environments.
“For larger organizations and in customer-facing environments, the quantity and size of datasets are increasing along with performance expectations and data diversity,” notes Gartner analyst Kevin Kampman in his recent report, “The Role of Virtual Directory and Synchronization Services in Large-Scale Identity Deployments.” Keep reading →
The explosion of mobile devices and technologies can be overwhelming to many organizations, especially federal agencies concerned with saving money through increased efficiency while maintaining network security.
A newly released desktop virtualization system focused on the government sector seeks to resolve these issues by providing a scalable, secure, end-to-end capability that can allow organizations to manage a variety of devices across networks. Keep reading →
New austerity is here to stay – coupled with more demand for user-friendly citizen engagement from our government workforce. And cybersecurity concerns are growing as well, as our enemies become more sophisticated and inventive. How can Federal agencies meet all three pressures – lowering costs while improving services and keeping data safe?
More than ever before, innovative technologies are needed across government, to keep the government workforce engaged while also helping them to effectively deliver support for the mission. Government is working hard today to implement the infrastructure needed to deliver more services, increase and enhance interaction and enable greater workforce mobility and citizen engagement. Mobility is growing in importance, even as cybersecurity becomes a bigger issue. Despite the promise of mobility to bring greater productivity and flexibility, 78 percent of federal IT professionals said mobility also brings greater security risks, according to a recent VMware survey. Keep reading →
Federal agencies are steadily moving to adopt cloud computing architectures for their IT services. But their progress is still spotty, and there is still a large amount of uncertainty about the technology in the public and private sectors, said Dave McClure, assistant administrator, Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies, General Services Administration.
McClure has a bird’s eye view of that progress. His office is responsible for overseeing and managing the GSA’s Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), which is a government-wide effort providing standardized assessment, security and continuous monitoring of cloud products and services. Keep reading →
There’s a battle brewing in the agency IT world, and for once, it has nothing to do with cloud computing — at least on the surface.
This fight is over hypervisors – a key component of a virtualization strategy and one that forms the basis for a successful private or hybrid cloud implementation. Specific battle lines are drawing around the various hypervisor “flavors” and which, if any, federal IT teams should standardize upon. Keep reading →
One of the many promised benefits of the cloud is the availability of cheap, unlimited storage. From a disaster recovery and business continuity perspective, virtualized storage of vital data is truly revolutionary, as it allows organizations to realize more affordable and more efficient backup strategies.
Before the cloud, companies and many organizations used tapes to back up data on a weekly basis, with daily incremental backups to capture changes, and then rotated those copies through physical off-site storage. 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 →