Data backup is a fundamental part of good IT and business management. But in the public sector it’s also the law. Established by President Obama in 2011, the National Archives and Records Administration maintains a comprehensive backup of all records of important transactions, actions, and other communications.

Although data backup sounds like a simple enough concept, the actual practice of consistently performing reliable backups and staying compliant with mandates and regulations offers up many significant challenges:

Data breaches seem to be becoming a fact for government business. As more devastating insights are revealed about the attack on OPM last year, the realities of the attackers capabilities are becoming more evident.

According to a 2015 data breach investigations report by Verizon:

• 60% of attackers are able to compromise an organization within minutes.

Delivering apps quickly and on a budget is a common challenge for government IT.  But there is a path to developing and delivering apps faster – it’s one that uses the building blocks of PaaS and DevOps.

When using modern application platforms, such as Red Hat OpenShift 3, developers can forge an easier path to develop, deploy, and run applications. OpenShift has recently been retooled to support containers.

Data center consolidation is nothing new. Yet, many agencies are struggling to reduce their data center footprint, that’s according to a new report from the General Accountability Office (GAO).

In 2010, the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative charged 24 agencies with consolidating data centers. As of November 2015, 10,584 data centers had been closed with a total savings and cost avoidances of $2.8 billion between 2011 and 2015 – not bad!

With the explosion of IoT sensors and devices, the data available to us is getting bigger and bigger. It’s a particular challenge facing federal agencies, especially in light of NARA’s Capstone compliance initiative, as well as an opportunity.

Bandwidth is one of those things we all take for granted, like electric power we don’t really pay attention to it until it’s gone. Then we get disgruntled.

So when an application is running slowly or a file won’t load, we tend to go straight to the IT helpdesk and complain about how slow the network seems to be. But is it really the bandwidth?

To enable our backups inside AWS, we have been leveraging Architect NBU within AWS.

Our environment above consist of a NetBackup Master/Media server.

EC2 instances of clients. Backing up to S3, all within one enclave.

Veritas NetBackup and Amazon Web Services combined has given us the capability to grow a backup infrastructure immensely with reliability and efficiently across multiple virtual environments. To, from and within the cloud.

As a Solutions Engineer at GitHub working with government customers, I speak to a lot of organizations looking to improve their software development process. They recognize GitHub as the most popular code repository and sharing environment in the world - where more than 11 million developers worldwide discover, fork, and contribute to over 29 million projects. Some of these agencies are already hosting their own projects on the site.

DC on Track to Meet Sustainability Goals thanks to Data-Rich City Models

Washington, D.C. is on a mission – to become the greenest, healthiest, and most livable city in the U.S. by 2032 as outlines in the Sustainable DC 2032 plan.

Iron Man thinks he’s so cool, but he’s got nothing on the heroics that database administrators perform everyday. Sure, he had to deal with aliens invading Earth and destroying New York, but at least he had the Avengers backing him up. Let’s see him try to manage multiple database platforms and keep an eye on the entire network infrastructure to ensure it runs smoothly on a reduced budget and with an increased emphasis on security.