There are many emerging technologies designed to help Federal managers optimize their data centers and operate their information technology infrastructures more efficiently. But with so many new choices, how do agencies pick the best solutions? […]
Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk. […]
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. […]
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. […]
With the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) formally signing on last month to adopt the same electronic health records system as the Department of Defense (DoD), the two agencies are putting a lot of chips on a solution to a problem that history suggests is pretty risky. […]
We’re witnessing momentous developments in government technology. The Modernizing Government Technology (MGT) Act promises new incentives for agencies that can prove they’re maximizing government funds to bring about IT transformation. […]
It’s not exactly the heist of the century, but the FDIC has stirred up a bit of controversy. Departing FDIC employees downloaded their family photos, personal emails, and the sensitive data of over 100,000 bank customers–oops. Instead of reporting to Congress, the agency stayed mum for months. This earned the agency a strict chiding from their IG in the form of a special inquiry issued on April 16. Fa […]
A new study finds that the public is warming up to the use of biometric identification technology, but remains wary of tracking applications and is looking to government to set standards in that area. […]
A bill introduced in the House on Thursday would create a series of minimum functionality and security requirements for all Federal government agency public-facing websites and digital services. […]
Federal government officials and a member of Congress influential in government IT spending debates said late last month that billions of additional savings look to be ripe for the picking through elimination of duplicative services, and that Congress is working on ways to beef up the pursuit of those savings. […]
Machine learning innovation is kicking into high gear. Investment in this field and data science increased 9.3 percent in 2016 to $2.4 billion, according to Gartner. On top of that, the Federal government is increasing its focus on machine learning, with the MGT Act, Technology Modernization Fund, and the President’s Management Agenda all supporting transformation efforts. […]
The Government Accountability Office–GAO–released a report exploring how Medicare beneficiary data are being shared with external organizations. When caring for patient record data, it seems government needs a better bedside manner and more. […]
Government employees are playing Russian roulette every time they open their inbox. […]
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s marathon Congressional sessions in front of both the House and Senate have produced countless talking points and incendiary sound bites. […]
It’s an old axiom: “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” And nowhere is that axiom truer these days than with Federal IT investments. Federal executives need to better understand, manage, and show value from money spent on IT resources. […]
While Federal agencies race to migrate to the cloud, security concerns seem to multiply by the hour. This month alone, Russian hackers penetrated the U.S. power grid; cyber attackers got into the network of a petrochemical company in Saudi Arabia in hopes of triggering an explosion; and North Korean hackers apparently “blitzed” Turkish banks and government organizations to gather intel for a future heist. […]
Federal IT comes with some baggage–much of its data is trapped in legacy technologies. Agencies can’t realistically pick everything up and move to more modern infrastructure. So how do they bridge the gap? MeriTalk’s latest report found that improving data sharing between new and legacy systems is the number one solution to accelerating Federal IT modernization. The “Modernizing the Monolith” study explores why legacy systems are so persistent and outlines a path to modernizing with them, instead of in spite of them. […]
The Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, Innovation, and the Internet took a deep dive look at the future of broadband in the United States during a hearing on Tuesday. “To make next-generation broadband a reality and position the United States so it can win the global race to 5G, we should modernize outdated rules that delay and add unnecessary costs to broadband infrastructure deployment,” said subcommittee Chairman Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss. […]
Not all bots are bad. But in the wrong hands, botnets can be commanded to do some very nefarious things, like Distributed Denial of Service–DDoS–attacks to disrupt and bring down websites. There are also malware-based bots that are increasingly being used to steal data and personal information. […]
Rather than focusing on technology, Compuware’s CEO Chris O’Malley believes Federal CIOs need to focus on people. A little strange coming from a tech CEO, but Chris seems to be on to something. Compuware is a reinvigorated 40-something mainframe software company based in Detroit in a tech space populated with young Californian cloud/agile upstarts–but O’Malley […]
As you open your fortune cookie–you might ask, will 2018 be the year of widespread deployment of Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) tools across Federal data centers? […]
The computing world has mobilized en masse in response to the revelation of Meltdown and Spectre, vulnerabilities in computer processors that could open most of the world’s PCs and mobile devices to “side-channel attacks” that could steal data. […]
Federal IT executives must move quickly to apply patches for the recently discovered Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities, but should also be on the lookout for potential performance hits and unforeseen glitches associated with the bug fixes. […]
An alliance of government agencies is taking a deep dive, as it were, into the world’s oceans as part of a larger project to develop a comprehensive environmental Earth model that could more accurately make predictions about weather and climate. The new model could enable forecasting events ahead of time, by days or even decades. […]
In a report released on Dec. 7, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that while Veterans Affairs (VA) has made some progress on key IT initiatives under Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) requirements, it has nonetheless fallen short of Office of Management and Budget (OMB) targets regarding consolidating and optimizing its data centers. […]
Two House panels investigating the Equifax Inc. data breach are zeroing in on “technical and process” failures that led to the loss of personally identifiable information, including Social Security numbers, belonging to more than 145 million Americans, according to recently released documents. […]
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson spoke frankly about the need IT modernization in the State Department last week, both referencing his personal experiences with the department’s servers and tying it into a larger need for reorganization in the department, but failing to lay out any concrete plan for the changes. […]
The FDIC is not accurately disclosing agency expenditures and spending information in compliance with the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (DATA Act), according to a recent audit issued by the FDIC Office of Inspector General (OIG). […]
The Department of Health and Human Services is looking for ways to combat stovepiped systems by using shared services across the agency for data management. “For us, data is front and center,” said Ed Simcox, deputy chief technology officer at HHS. […]
Government agencies are trying to move beyond simply managing data to analyzing and using data to inform decisions. “We have a lot of information and that information needs to be tied together,” said Michael Peckham, Data Act Project Management Office executive director for Health and Human Services, at Software AG’s Innovation Tour on Nov. 2. […]