Smarter Gov Tech, Stronger MerITocracy

David Nelson, chief information officer of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said Wednesday at ATARC’s Cloud & Data Center Summit that technology providers are using outdated talking points when describing the attitudes of CIOs in the Federal government, and called upon vendors to assist government leaders, instead of discussing the shortcomings in their agencies. […]

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report Thursday that found many Federal agencies are not entirely up to speed in classifying members of their cybersecurity workforce, although many of them have traveled well down the road toward compliance. […]

Leadership of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee on Wednesday pressed the head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) for necessary follow-up to passage earlier this year of the MOBILE NOW Act. […]

Dr. Tom Leighton, chief executive officer of cloud service provider Akamai, said Thursday that data center defense on its own is woefully inadequate to handle capacity available at the edge of the network to launch distributed attacks. […]

GSA

Proposals with great citizen impact, quick routes to success and repayment, and concise explanations of how to achieve their goals are likely to win the remaining dollars in the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF), according to representatives from the General Services Administration (GSA) speaking at a workshop held June 8. […]

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee advanced 14 bills out of its business meeting today, including legislation to protect against drone threats and to establish a framework for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that will improve data sharing across DHS’s numerous component agencies. […]

White House

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) will release a new government-wide Federal cloud computing strategy sometime in the next few months, OMB Digital Services Expert Bill Hunt said Wednesday at ATARC’s Cloud & Data Center Summit. […]

The possibilities of quantum computing have been floating on the horizon for a while now, at least since renowned physicist Richard Feynman dreamed up the idea in 1982. But like the horizon itself (at least in a world that isn’t flat), it always seems to recede despite all efforts to close in on it. Until now. […]

Sens. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said on Monday that an amendment they introduced last week to defense legislation that would ban government agencies from buying goods and services from China-based communications equipment makers ZTE and Huawei made the cut for inclusion into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY 2019. […]

Akamai today released an Attack Spotlight recounting how it mitigated the largest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in its history. Earlier this year, an Akamai client, an unnamed software company, was the target of a massive DDoS attack–one that broke the 1 terabyte per second threshold for the first time. […]

Federal agencies are facing a tall order in cleaning up their cybersecurity practices in the wake of some tough love dished out by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in a risk assessment and action plan released May 30. Agencies need to streamline processes, better share information, and finds ways of getting a better return on their cyber investments, all of which can be harder than it sounds. […]

Federal agencies and private sector firms are easing into intelligent automation (IA) technologies by first using those technologies to tackle repetitive processes and then moving closer to artificial intelligence (AI) applications, government and private sector officials said last week. […]

Legislative direction moving Federal agencies toward incremental development in their software initiatives is beginning to take hold, and Agile development methodologies have been a key driver of that success, according to an agency CIO, a leader in government IT modernization, and an industry executive assisting agencies in Agile adoption. […]

Rod Turk, acting chief information officer at the Department of Commerce, said Thursday at MeriTalk’s 2018 Cloud Computing Brainstorm that the commodification of IT is changing the service delivery model to make shared services an inevitability, and agencies need to shift their thinking to adapt. Turk outlined his guiding principles for priming agencies for the shared services revolution and provided a set of process questions to aid in implementation. […]

Cloud computing technologies can help change how the Federal government handles its systems by providing an avenue to embrace IT modernization, said government executives on Thursday during a panel at MeriTalk’s 2018 Cloud Computing Brainstorm. […]

Witnesses from the Federal government, academia, and the private sector zeroed in on cyber threats facing the U.S. electric grid at a House Energy subcommittee hearing Thursday afternoon. During the hearing–which largely centered around research and innovations in electric grid and energy technology–all of the witnesses stressed the importance of shoring up the U.S. electric […]

House members on Thursday reintroduced a bipartisan bill that would prevent states from requiring technology companies to include encryption “backdoors” in their products that would allow governments to access data stored on those products. […]

Cloud computing can enable agencies to collect data from internet of things (IoT) devices and select the right tools for related tasks, IT industry leaders said Wednesday during a panel discussion at MeriTalk’s 2018 Cloud Computing Brainstorm. […]

A shift to the cloud offers government agencies an opportunity to embrace digital transformation, add automation, and rethink processes, said Federal IT panelists on Wednesday at MeriTalk’s 2018 Cloud Computing Brainstorm. […]

It’s no secret–Federal agencies are on the move to the cloud. We’ve seen the legislation and read the reports; the move to commercial cloud continues to march on. It’s a streamlined solution that offers cost savings, flexibility, innovation, and security. […]

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