Federal agencies lose an estimated $300 billion a year to fraud, waste, and abuse. Bad guys are the Grinch – $300 billion could pay a lot of bills. Or pay for better cybersecurity. That’s what agencies want for Christmas. No agency is safe, according to the esteemed panelists at MeriTalk’s Stealing from Uncle Sam forum. […]

Pot’s legal in DC (unless Congress steps in and says no to drugs). Nearly 70 percent of voters gave weed the high sign. But that’s not smoke in the sky. Those are clouds because there’s a lot of buzz surrounding cloud computing these days. Cloud and Data Centers: A Joint Effort Feds are (trying to) […]

Remember the old days? Agencies protected networks and data by guarding their perimeter and that was enough. Agencies relied on anti-virus software. There was none of this insider threat stuff. No PLA. No APTs. Feds got a raise every year, no one knew what sequestration was, and flip phones were awesome. Times have changed. Zombie […]

FBI Director James Comey took the Feds’ cybersecurity message to prime time TV – not a bad way to reach an audience. In the wake of the JP Morgan breach, Director Comey used 60 Minutes as a platform to warn of the growing “epidemic” of cyber crime. Director Comey pointed his finger directly at the […]

Life’s a gamble, but there’s no need to take a risk with IT networks. Feds can double their savings by leveraging consolidation, virtualization, cloud computing, remote access, and infrastructure diversification. Now that’s hitting the jackpot. Despite the benefits, Feds have made only modest investments to modernize networks. A report by MeriTalk highlights the critical role […]

Some things get better with age. Wine. Blue jeans. Sofia Vergara. But not everything improves as it gets older. Milk. Tattoos. Data centers. Feds want their data and they want it now. Seems like a reasonable expectation, but it doesn’t always work out so well – especially as data centers get older. That’s why reliability […]

With official Washington on a month-long siesta, it’s a good time to shift our attention to life outside the Beltway. Feds have aggressively pursued policies that encourage telework and boost mobility, and they’ve come a long way. Employees like to work on the go, and they have the resources to be productive anywhere. What about […]

Federal agencies are struggling with their old IT networks. It may be time for a makeover. Put away the polyester. Burn the bell bottoms. Old networks lead to complexity, and that makes it harder than ever for Federal agencies to do their jobs, let alone innovate, according to a new study from MeriTalk. Complexity means […]

Nothing excites this town like scandalous behavior. The Library of Congress this month will unseal love letters written by President Warren G. Harding. The 29th president – generally regarded as one of the nation’s worst presidents – wrote the letters to Carrie Fulton Phillips. President Harding and Carrie Phillips weren’t married. That may not seem […]

The joke’s on us. Interstate 66. Metro (I’m looking at you, Red Line). The 14th Street Bridge. Route 50. The Baltimore-Washington Parkway. At some point they will ruin your day, and everyone has a commuting horror story. Every time we step into a Metro car, it’s like flipping a coin. Every time we pile into […]

What do cyber crime and soccer have in common? Both are big and getting bigger. When the World Cup begins tomorrow, Spain, Germany, and Brazil will have the best odds of winning. They have dynamic players and play good offense. But when it comes to cyber security, you have to play good defense, and most […]

Today’s the big day. Maybe. Two years after Feds launched FedRAMP, cloud service providers must finish jumping over all the hurdles if they want to have a part in this program with the funny name. Or not. June 5 looks like a faux deadline. And the rules appear subject to change. OMB, which will act […]

The cloud is a lot of things. Is it also a cyber security tool? Maybe so. Rep. Darrell Issa made an interesting observation this week at the Cloud Computing Caucus Advisory Group’s discussion about cloud computing and cyber security. Because the National Security Agency – like so many other Federal agencies – still relies in […]

Everything about the DATA Act makes sense. Except that it’s 2014 and lawmakers should have passed this legislation years ago. But, hey – better late than never, and President Obama signed the bill last Friday. There’s a lot to like about the DATA Act, bipartisan legislation sponsored by Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Rob Portman […]

Companies claimed the 65,000 H-1B visas for Fiscal 2015 in a matter of hours on April 1. No joke. Last year the visas disappeared in five days. Reforms are needed. Not because demand for visas is high, but because no one likes the current system. Another 20,000 visas are set aside for advanced degree graduates […]

Federal work has an image problem. In a land of high-performance vehicles, younger workers view Federal work as a Chevy Malibu. It’s a clunker. Little Interest Employees younger than 30 make up just 8.5 percent of the Federal workforce, compared to 23 percent of the total U.S. workforce. They go to Silicon Valley in hopes […]

Ah, spring training is in full swing. The crack of the bat. The roar of the crowd. The low hum of computers analyzing Big Data sets. Huh? America’s pastime will intersect with technology in a new way this season. That’s because Major League Baseball Advanced Media LP, the league’s technology arm, will use six to […]

This just in… We love news here at MeriTalk, whether it’s Russian troops in Ukraine, NASA discovering 715 new planets, or spring training. When members of the cloud community met on the Hill for the Cloud Computing Caucus Advisory Group event to discuss FedRAMP, we didn’t get much news on the program’s looming deadline. We […]

Mr. Putin is on edge. It’s unclear if the threat of a terrorist attack during the Olympics or the Russian hockey team’s loss to the U.S. men’s team is a bigger worry, but both must have him tossing and turning. Nearly 60 percent of Americans expected a terrorist attack during the 22nd Winter Olympics. Russia […]

The cashier at Target expressed surprise that we chose to pay our bill with a check from our dusty, seldom-used checkbook, but acknowledged we weren’t the only customers to do so. “Weird. You’re the fourth people I’ve had write a check today,” she said. Not weird. The cashier didn’t get the connection, but in the […]

Tech startups are all the rage. Again. Venture capitalists invested $7.8 billion in the third quarter, according to data released October 18 by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. Software is king, and investors sank $3.6 billion in software startups. The next big cloud application, analytics tool or cybersecurity framework could emerge from these […]