Though many agencies want to, or are mandated to, move applications onto Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) tools, Dustin Laun says that agencies should be more deliberate in determining what they need from a platform provider. “I feel the government buys off of paper and presentations, and they don’t really know how simple these things are,” said Laun, contracted senior adviser for innovation and technology at the FCC. […]

The Department of Justice plans to have three physical data centers by 2019, according to Mark Busby, program manager of data center transformation. […]

The Department of State has moved from leased data center facilities to data centers on government property by using a modular approach. […]

Energy Savings Performance Contracts are a good way for Federal agencies to reduce their data centers’ energy footprint, according to Timothy Unruh, director of the Federal Energy Management Program for the Department of Energy. […]

The National Assessment of Educational Progress released The Nation’s Report Card: 2015 Science, with results showing fourth and eighth graders increasing their science scores from 2009. […]

MeriTalk compiles a weekly roundup of contracts and other industry activity. Here’s what happened this week in the Federal Information Technology community. […]

An exception to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act will go into effect this weekend, allowing white hat hackers to legally test the security of consumer-facing products for the purposes of alerting companies to potential bugs in their programs. […]

America’s Internet infrastructure could be seeing other denial-of-service attacks similar to the one targeted at Dyn last week, according to Josh Finke at Iron Bow. The large scale of the attack, the availability of the source code for the malware online, and the number of susceptible Internet of Things devices, make this type of attack attractive to hackers. […]

The National Technical Information Service named data.world, a social network for people interested in working with data, as one of 35 organizations announced as partners for its Joint Venture Partnership program. […]

The White House released a proposed guidance on modernizing Federal IT that is open for public comment until Nov. 26. […]

In the wake of recent Dyn attacks that temporarily shut down major websites such as Twitter, Amazon, and PayPal, Sens. Angus King, I-Maine, and Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., sent a letter to President Obama this week to request a strengthening of the U.S. ability to detect and respond to major vulnerabilities. […]

The Federal Communications Commission voted to adopt new online consumer privacy rules that would require Internet service providers to obtain opt-in consent for the collection of sensitive information and opt-out consent for any other information. […]

The White House launched Worker.gov, which explains Federal workforce protections. […]

In the push to modernize legacy IT systems, agencies should be more strategic about which systems they choose to invest in, according to experts at Dell EMC World. […]

The Office of Management and Budget selected 15 government employees to join the White House Leadership Development Program, which will focus on improving IT management and services throughout the Federal government. […]

The hacker group the Shadow Brokers released files Monday alleging to show which foreign governments and organizations were under surveillance by the National Security Agency. The Shadow Brokers directly asked the U.S. government to pay for the remaining files to be returned. […]

With one inspector general report accusing it of gross mismanagement of taxpayer dollars and two more reports on the way, longtime Federal IT professionals warn that the General Services Administration’s 18F digital services startup may have set itself up for failure. […]

The Department of Education, the Agency for International Development, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced public access plans to increase access to Federally funded research. […]

The majority of college students–77 percent–think that schools should be using more of their personal data to improve their college experience, according to a study by the Wakefield Research group. […]

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy launched the beta site for the Resilience Dialogues, an online forum for collaboration on solutions related to climate change. […]

In order to ensure the security of IT devices while also reducing the proliferation of “shadow IT” in the government, agencies must work to create “win-win” compromises with device users, according to panelists at Dell EMC World. […]

The National Institute of Standards and Technology announced the release of CyberSeek, an interactive map that shows cybersecurity job availability by both state and locality. […]

Ninety percent of policymakers, open data experts, and private sector leaders believe that the standardization and publication of government data relating to their field has improved to at least some extent over the last few years, according a report from the Data Foundation and Grant Thornton. […]

The U.S. Air Force is talking to Congress about starting a multiyear, replenishable fund for cloud computing, according to Frank Konieczny, the chief technology officer of the Office of Information Dominance and chief information officer of the Office of the Secretary at the U.S. Air Force. […]

When the cloud houses many single applications that aren’t designed to work with other servers, it can indicate communication problems within government agencies. The Small Business Administration uses the same application on two different cloud networks. “Two offices that never talk to each other, they’re doing the same thing,” said Maria Roat, chief information officer at the SBA, who spoke at Cloud Connect on Nov. 2 in Washington, D.C. “The problem right now is the cloud is really siloed.” […]

The U.S. Departments of Education and Health and Human Services (HHS) released their first joint policy brief on children using educational technology. The brief serves as a call to action to researchers, developers, and administrators to address important research questions and develop products that ensure the best uses of technology in early learning. […]

The speed of government cloud adoption and authorization is both good and bad, depending on which agency is asked, according to panelists at Dell EMC World. “Some of the slowness works to our advantage,” said Annette Moore, acting director and acting CIO at the NASA Johnson Space Center. “In instances it certainly does not.” […]

The need for mobility and security has propelled cloud adoption forward, but agencies are still trying to figure out what to do with it, according to Sonu Singh, president and chief executive officer of 1901 Group. “IT in the government is going to change more in the next five years than the past 30 years,” Singh said at MeriTalk’s Cloud Connect 2016 event on Nov. 2 in Washington, D.C. […]

MeriTalk conducted a Q&A with Filippo Menczer, a professor of Informatics and Computer Science and the director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing. In May 2016, he and his team launched the Observatory on Social Media, a big data hub for people to analyze social media trends. […]

Censeo Consulting Group worked with Cyrrus Analytics and Hettinger Strategy Group to create the report “FITARA at a Crossroads.” MeriTalk summarizes the 10 recommendations. […]