Federal agencies are starting to see significant advantages in reversing how they gather and analyze data to fuel their artificial intelligence efforts. Instead of pulling massive amounts of data into centralized data lakes for analysis, enterprises are staring to send analytics tools to the edge of their networks to parse localized data and then federate the results. The change in approach represents a paradigm shift in how organizations are capturing and analyzing data, says Al Ford, who overs...
Nov 15, 2021•9 min
The advent of containerized software services — and the emergence of Kubernetes to deploy and manage them – have played crucial roles in modernizing applications. But it has also unleashed a host of new opportunities for malicious actors to exploit misconfigurations and vulnerabilities inside these microservices, says Palo Alto Networks' Paul Fox. That’s why he says federal agencies should take a closer look at a new technical report, released by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Cybers...
Nov 08, 2021•11 min
With massive amounts of data being captured outside of data centers and at the edge, there is a growing need for organizations to use cloud to modernize edge computing environments. According to one cloud expert, this is driving the move for hybrid IT adoption across government and industry. “What you see in the private sector is they want to deal with the data where it's generated, so they can get the fastest insights and so they don't have the expense of moving that data,” says Bill Burnham, c...
Oct 28, 2021•10 min
Cohesive and consistent messaging from the federal government is an important part of the push for agencies to implement zero trust architecture. Making sure the new processes are easy and accessible is just as important, says Peter Romness, cybersecurity programs lead, U.S. public sector, Cisco Systems. “Users are seeing the need for more security, so they're willing to do things like multi-factor authentication, but also industry has made multi-factor authentication much easier,” says Romness....
Oct 22, 2021•9 min
As government agencies continue to implement and adjust return to office plans, it is clear that remote work and hybrid work postures will continue to be part of day-to-day operations. With many factors remaining uncertain, it is important for organizations to remain willing and able to adjust when handling their workforce, says Stephen Ellis. “There's so many intertwined elements in [return to office planning], I think that the key word to solving this knot is flexibility. Ultimately, that's th...
Sep 15, 2021•11 min
The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically shifted expectations of how and where federal employees work at most federal agencies. But what agency leaders may not have fully considered, warns a government network expert, is how agencies can ensure their employees have reliable connections from various hybrid locations, including their homes. “In an office situation, if an employee's internet connection went down, they would be able to call the help desk and resolve the problem fairly quickly. But wit...
Sep 15, 2021•13 min
As agencies continue to embrace cloud solutions, the need to integrate systems has taken on new importance. At the same time, finding the right talent to help with cloud integration remains a challenge. That’s where a low-code, no-code integration platform-as-a-service model is becoming increasingly beneficial for agencies, says Public Sector Chief Technology Officer Joseph Flynn at Dell Boomi. “Part of what makes [cloud integration] difficult is the explosive growth in [agencies’] applications ...
Aug 30, 2021•14 min
Government agencies at the federal agencies have almost universally seen their long-term plans for IT upgrades put on a fast-track this past year in response to surges in demands to support remote workers and fulfill public services. One factor that helped make that possible — and in many ways, has put agencies in a stronger position to modernize moving forward — was the increasing reliance on open architecture and hybrid cloud environments, according to IBM's Dan Chenok. “What we saw in the las...
Aug 06, 2021•10 min
Any natural disaster — be it hurricane, fire, earthquake of flood — has the potential to l disrupt communications. But for federal agencies and their field offices, it’s critical that they keep their lines of communication open so that they can serve their constituents. The challenge, according to Tony Bardo, assistant vice president for government solutions at Hughes, is that “most agency networks are not built with as much redundancy and resiliency as they need to be to survive a disaster.” Ba...
Aug 05, 2021•7 min
The sharp uptick in successful cyber attacks during the COVID-19 pandemic serves as a stark reminder to government leaders that their existing security strategies still leave adversaries plenty of vulnerabilities to exploit. According to former White House security advisor Dan Prieto, cyber attackers continue to find new ways to capitalize on weak points in legacy infrastructure and virtual private networks (VPN), compromise email and insert malicious code into software supply chains. The increa...
Aug 03, 2021•12 min
As agencies look to improve network performance and security, one approach that often gets overlooked involves converging the tools and data belonging to agency NOCs and SOCs — network operations centers and security operations centers. Years of entrenched operating practices, budgeting and acquisition authorities, and cultural dispositions have tended to drive network and security operations teams down separate, albeit closely related, technology lanes. That has often led agency NOCs and SOCs t...
Jul 26, 2021•14 min
Google Cloud’s Gary Danoff shares the benefits agencies reap when they embrace virtual collaboration platforms and best-practices for those implementing hybrid-work strategies. Agencies adopted a variety of collaboration platforms over the last year, creating new connections between humans and technology that allow them to shift seamlessly between working virtually and working in-person. “I think government leaders should acknowledge that people are going to feel a little awkward about being abl...
Jul 06, 2021•10 min
Federal, state and local governments are still adapting to the consequences of COVID-19. But what many of them have discovered is that in the face of growing citizen demands, shifting administration priorities and budget uncertainties, it’s still possible to adopt new technologies relatively quickly to deliver digital services. For Andrew Fairbanks, who leads a public sector team of more than 3,000 professionals for IBM Global Services, the ability for agencies to shift to new technologies was b...
Jun 29, 2021•12 min
Artificial intelligence tools are increasingly being used by government agencies to meet their mission needs. This last year in particular, the need to help people remotely and respond to the public health crisis pushed many federal and state agency leaders to evaluate and implement AI tools. Technology evangelist Alexis Bonnell worked alongside several agencies to imagine the “art of the possible” as they took significant steps towards AI and machine learning adoption. Bonnell breaks down sever...
Jun 25, 2021•13 min
U.S. Customs and Border Protection director Ed Mays and Dell Technologies’ John Garrett discuss what’s driving the need for increased edge computing resources. They discuss the increase of users and devices on federal networks, in addition to the surge in data generation. That is driving a need for higher performing computing capabilities at the edge of their networks. “As we get more and more of these embedded devices out there — and the possibilities of what AI is capable of expands — you have...
May 24, 2021•16 min
Throughout the public health crisis, cloud and artificial intelligence-enabled tools have been a great help to advancing research, collaboration and mission activities. Particularly encouraging is the way that public health leaders are able to share biological information across the globe, says Google Cloud’s Dr. Alexander Titus. “I think that collaboration across science has always been pretty strong. But this has really shown us some of the strengths around how fast we can collaborate [togethe...
May 06, 2021•13 min
The volume and velocity of data generated by government continues to grow at astronomic rates. At the same time, federal agencies have a lot of legacy applications that need to be re-factored to take advantage of modern architectures While government organizations continue to look for more effective ways to handle high-volume data management and analysis strategies, they can benefit from taking advantage of tools that have already been tried and tested within the private sector. John Dillon, CEO...
Mar 16, 2021•15 min
The pandemic was a forcing agent causing agencies to rethink identity and how users access government resources and placed a greater emphasis on cloud-based services. As a result, IT leaders are looking more holistically at how they manage identity across the enterprise network while still complying with federal identity, credential and access management (FICAM) rules. Andrew Whelchel and Dmitry Kagansky join FedScoop to discuss strategies around modern identity and security in the cloud and how...
Feb 28, 2021•10 min
Government agencies have been trying to reduce their reliance on paper for decades. While Congress moved to speed up this process when it passed the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act in 2018, agencies are still processing millions of paper forms a year. One of the many challenges agencies continue to face is that these processes also require new infrastructure, website updates and digital services to streamline the customer experience. Foxit's DeeDee Kato says there are challenges s...
Feb 24, 2021•13 min
Having a data strategy is not a "nice-to-have" anymore, rather it’s a "must-have" for federal agencies, according to Aileen Black. Agencies are making progress in incorporating principles and practices from the Federal Data Strategy, but many still struggle to provide trust in, and secure access to, government data. “I have the opportunity see governments around the world. And the U.S. federal government is advanced relative to many of their international counterparts in implementing a data stra...
Feb 02, 2021•16 min
As the federal government transitions to a new administration, and new priorities, one initiative that’s expected to remain on track is the Federal Data Strategy — a set of principles, practices and action steps to make more productive use of federal data. But where and how agencies move forward with their data strategies — and whether they get the IT funding they need — will play an important part in advancing the Biden administration’s priorities, say two federal government data experts in a n...
Jan 26, 2021•15 min
Data management platforms not only play a part in driving digital transformation in the public sector, but also represent a key factor in attracting talent into public service. Brian Chidester says the future of government work is playing out across three different theaters: work, workforce and the workplace. Each one of them are key to improving the of delivery of government services. Chidester says that while federal agencies have been charged with leveraging data to improve citizen services, ...
Jan 25, 2021•11 min
Bonus Podcast: IC's Nancy Morgan at the Data Cloud Summit by FedScoop
Jan 14, 2021•24 min
Cloud computing has given federal agencies newfound ability to run large-scale modeling and high-performance computing workloads that not that long ago required coveted time slots on supercomputers. But moving the massive data sets from agency data centers to the cloud still involves a lot of work. Data extraction charges can also be costly and until recently, latency was a significant issue. That’s changing thanks to new capabilities available from a software solution that many federal agencies...
Dec 14, 2020•12 min
The pandemic fundamentally changed the way agencies approach user access to systems and data. With telework, IT departments had to confront weakness in identity management that weren’t designed for large numbers of unmanaged devices connecting from offsite networks. The shift in security drew a distinction between authenticator tools and authentication controls, says Duo Security’s Bryan Rosensteel. Efforts to configure security workarounds put a spotlight on modernizing authentication and ident...
Dec 11, 2020•14 min
Federal datasets are growing exponentially, and as they do, agencies are rising to the occasion to better understand, manage, analyze, visualize and share their data through improved strategy and increased leadership. With a host of data on hand, agencies have been placing a new emphasis on the importance of that data and what they can do with it, says Red Hat's David Egts, in a new podcast. He is joined with Henry Sowell from Cloudera Government Solutions to discuss the criticality of clean, us...
Nov 03, 2020•14 min
During the pandemic, the security threats facing federal agencies have significantly expanded. While the number of agency endpoints grow and federal employees work remotely with limited VPNs and legacy equipment, hackers are not relenting. To account for this new cloud-based paradigm where the network is no longer confined to the physical walls of a federal building, agencies must now pivot to a zero trust view of security from the data layer, says Spunk's CISO, Yassir Abousselham. “We cannot an...
Oct 28, 2020•13 min
Government agencies are discovering managed security services represent an increasingly attractive alternative to trying to find and retain the cybersecurity skills they need to defend against a growing array of threats. That’s due in part to the need for newer, deeper and broader security skills than most agencies have on staff and managed services providers have the ability to access the depth and breadth of talents and capabilities that might not otherwise be available in an agency setting. T...
Oct 12, 2020•18 min
The remote workforce has opened up the floodgates on cyber risk, presenting new challenges to operate safely in distributed environments. In addition to staying on top of growing threats, government CTOs and CISOs are also required to keep their environments current on an extensive list of federal compliance and regulatory guidance. Microsoft’s Alym Rayani explains how IT leaders will benefit from AI-enabled tools to converge security and compliance. Sponsored by Microsoft. Guest: Alym Rayani, G...
Oct 09, 2020•10 min
The extensive ecosystem of open source partners and applications can be a boon to federal agencies trying to boost their modernization efforts. IT leader Christine Cox says that agencies which work with the global open source development community are able to accelerate service delivery and overcome many of the common barriers to cloud modernization. Developing applications using open source tools can help federal agencies future-proof digital services, by avoiding vendor lock-in, enhance their ...
Oct 04, 2020•11 min
