Dan Verton

 

Posts by Dan Verton

Battle Lines Being Drawn Over Cybersecurity Legislation

By

Just two days after introducing the controversial Cybersecurity Act of 2012, Senate lawmakers on Thursday plan to hold a hearing on the legislation, raising concerns that what some are calling a flawed piece of legislation may be on the fast-track for approval by the end of March.

The bill would grant the Department of Homeland Security vast new regulatory authorities over select portions of the nation’s critical infrastructure – everything from the national electric grid to transportation, water and financial services, among others. Keep reading →

 /  Published February 15, 2012 at 4:41 PM

Senate Cybersecurity Bill Could Revive Kill Switch, Crush Innovation

By

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 →

 /  Published February 9, 2012 at 10:35 AM

Government Contracting Opportunities Remain Vibrant Despite Budget Cuts

By

UPDATED Dec. 13 with video synopsis. Despite the looming threat of significant, across the board budget cuts for federal agencies, there are still major government contracting opportunities that will remain vibrant into the near future. And regardless if you’re a large government contractor, small business or agency program manager, you need to know where to look before you can take advantage of these opportunities.

That was the underlying message at a monthly luncheon forum on Government Acquisition Trends and Techniques Dec. 8, hosted by the Association For Federal Information Resources Management (AFFIRM). Keep reading →

 /  Published December 12, 2011 at 3:34 PM

Adm. Thad Allen: Changing Government Requires Flexible, Learning Leaders

By

In 2007, Admiral Thad Allen had a feeling that something was changing in the workforce he led. There was something fundamentally different about the new generation of men and women in the Coast Guard. So Allen, who had become the 23rd Commandant a year earlier, did what nobody would expect a 36-year veteran to do — he embraced social media and started blogging.

“I was sensing a change with the advent of social media and how young people were aggregating [data] and producing behaviors without being in each other’s presence,” said Allen, who spoke to Breaking Gov contributor Dan Verton at his new Booz Allen Hamilton office in McLean, Va., last week about a variety of management topics, including the importance of “meta-leadership” in government. Keep reading →

 /  Published December 1, 2011 at 2:30 PM

How Homeland Security’s CBP Turned $335 Million Budget Cut Into Cloud Opportunity

By

When Wolf Tombe took over as chief technology officer at the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection Agency (CBP), there were more than 3,000 deployed technologies, a major data center had run out of room and power, yet server utilization was only 10 percent, and almost every server in the agency had a different configuration and operating system.

That was 8 years ago. Keep reading →

 /  Published November 28, 2011 at 11:45 AM

Changes To Federal Cloud Contracting On The Way; Agencies Need More Flexibilty

By

Officials from the General Services Administration (GSA) said this week that the agency is preparing the next version of the federal government’s main cloud computing acquisition vehicle – the Infrastructure-as-a-Service Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) – as part of a broader effort to better position federal agencies to take advantage of the growing number of commercial cloud services.

Awarded to 12 cloud services vendors in October 2010, the $76 million Infrastructure-as-a-Service BPA was designed to provide agencies with a one-stop shop for ready-made cloud computing services, particularly Web hosting, storage and virtual machines. So far, the contract vehicle has attracted the likes of the Department of Homeland Security, which recently moved its public Web hosting to the cloud, and the Department of Labor, which now leverages cloud services for enterprise case and document management. Keep reading →

 /  Published November 18, 2011 at 11:05 AM

Inside A Super Secure Federal Data ‘Vault’

By

Federal agencies have begun the long march to cloud — moving selected portions of their data processing work into the Internet cloud, prompted in large part by an Obama administration “Cloud First” mandate initiated last year.

Some of that work–from computing infrastructure on demand to software delivered as a service–is already being provisioned by commercial providers, including Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), as well as Google, Microsoft and others. Keep reading →

 /  Published November 14, 2011 at 8:56 AM

Federal Cloud Computing Still In Infancy Observes Key Provider

By

The National Institute of Standards and Technology concluded its latest forum on federal cloud computing earlier this month with the release of the U.S. Government Cloud Computing Technology Roadmap designed to help federal agencies understand the essential characteristics of authentic cloud services.

From the point of view of those who provide cloud computing infrastructure services, though, the federal government still has a long way to go in learning how to utilize such services. Keep reading →

 /  Published November 14, 2011 at 8:53 AM

Government Data Centers Under Fire

By

A nationwide network of 72 government-supported, state-run data centers used for sharing law enforcement and counterterrorism information are coming under increasing fire as federal budget cuts, intra-agency turf battles and Congressional scrutiny are raising fresh questions about their effectiveness.

Although the federal government has made significant progress in the last decade to improve terrorism-related information sharing, widely divergent operating practices in how information as assembled and used at these so-called data fusion centers have led some in Congress and others in the government to question their value. Keep reading →

 /  Published October 24, 2011 at 8:01 AM

Congress Needs To Get The Facts Straight About Information Sharing

By


When the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs gathered last week to hear testimony about the state of information sharing across all levels of government, the committee leaders and even some of the expert witnesses pointed to the killings of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki as two examples of how information sharing across federal agency boundaries has improved.

Wrong. Keep reading →

 /  Published October 20, 2011 at 3:24 PM
Page 3 of 6123456