If you’re a technology solutions provider, we hope you had a great summer and managed to squeeze in some time off, because the busy season is here, and September has already been a frenzy.

Work is already a top source of stress for many Americans, but right now government procurement teams face enormous pressure as they rush to negotiate and award contracts while ensuring regulatory compliance before the federal fiscal year ends on September 30^th.

This week we sat down with DLT Senior Director of Program Management, Steve Wells, to discuss how DLT's contract expertise can be beneficial to its technology company clients and public sector customers, particularly as we approach the end of the Federal Fiscal Year. We also discussed Steve's military career, of which he just celebrated a major milestone.

Interviewer: Hi Steve, thanks for sitting down with us today. To start, why don’t you tell us a little bit about what you do at DLT.

An irony of late appropriations – as the federal government experienced for the umpteenth time in fiscal 2018 – is that rather than rush to spend, your federal customers are actually spending at rates below what they’re authorized to spend. That makes it harder to maximize the year-end spending blitz.

It takes some doing, but if you’ve got the fortitude to plow through reports from the Bureau of the Fiscal Services and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), it’s possible to discern that agencies simply might not have the time and manpower to execute on every program.

Shortly after the federal government suffered it’s largest and costliest data breach ever at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), a post-mortem analysis found that the breach was entirely preventable, and the exfiltration of security clearance files of government employees and contractors could have been prevented through the implementation of two-factor authentication for remote log-ons.

Movies and TV would have us believe that data breaches are long, hard-fought battles between the good guy and the bad guy—and the bad guy wins. That could not be further from reality. Hackers are opportunistic. They want to spend as little time as possible getting into the system, getting what they need, getting out, and exploiting it as fast as possible.

The CAD and digital design sector is vast and growing at breakneck speed. It’s expected to reach $11.21 billion by 2023.

Many end-use industries such as automotive, aerospace, entertainment, industrial machinery, civil and construction, electrical and electronics, pharmaceutical, and healthcare, consumer goods, and others, widely use CAD and 3D design-based tools in their development processes.

Aside from developing one of the sought after building information modeling (BIM) software in the industry today, you’ve got to hand it to the Revit product managers over at Autodesk—they listen.

Symantec’s 2018 Internet Security Threat Report is here. Based on data collected by Symantec’s massive security infrastructure (the largest civilian threat collection network in the world), the report has become the de facto standard for giving enterprises and public organizations essential information to help secure their systems effectively.

By the nature of the topic, the report isn’t an easy read. Expect to be perturbed. However, the insights provided into today’s rapidly evolving threat landscape are invaluable.

Another day, another government ransomware victim. On March 22^nd, 2018, the city of Atlanta found itself locked out of computers across government offices and facing a ransom demand of $51,000 or $6,800 per computer, GCN reported.

Ransomware is quickly becoming the favored means for criminals to extract a profit from unsuspecting villains – most notably in the public sector. Throughout 2017 ransomware grabbed the headlines – WannaCry, Petya, etc. – both of which targeted government agencies. When they succeed the implications can be serious.