As kids we learned a simple yet powerful lesson that taught us a lifelong truth: sharing resources leads to positive outcomes.

Today, federal IT managers are learning that lesson all over again. Except now, the toys being shared are managers and resources devoted to websites, content, performance, and infrastructure management, among other things.

Barriers to innovation are commonplace in government IT and include budgetary limitations, security and compliance concerns, the need to continue supporting legacy technology, and more.

You’ve probably heard a lot about how government agencies need to move on from legacy technology in order to become more agile and built for the future, but what about moving on from a legacy culture?

That’s a key challenge for agencies seeking to become more agile and streamlined, especially those that are used to doing things a certain way. This way has traditionally consisted of development and operations teams working in separate silos, each with their own roles and responsibilities.

Back in May, I wrote about the 6 Elements of a Government Insider Threat Program as recommended by a panel of government and industry experts at this year’s Symantec Government Symposium in Washington, D.C.

#1 on the list was educating the workforce.

Red Hat recently announced the general availability of OpenShift Enterprise 3 (OSE3), the next-generation of Red Hat's award-winning Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering. OSE3 is the first enterprise-ready web-scale container application platform based on Docker format Linux containers, Kubernetes orchestration and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to provide full support from the operating system to application runtimes. OSE3 helps organizations accelerate application development and delivery by enabling development and operations teams to be more agile, responsive, and efficient.

Fans of spy fiction (of which there are many in the government ranks) might be familiar with the term “come in from the cold.” It refers to someone who has been cast as an outsider and now wishes to abandon the past, be embraced, and become relevant again.

The decision to retain hours of Baltimore’s CitiWatch camera footage of Freddie Gray's arrest and the subsequent unrest in the city has limited the current capacity of CCTV cameras to three days, according to a recent article by the Baltimore Sun.

The Veritas Volume Replicator (VVR) Option provides organizations with a foundation for continuous data replication, enabling rapid and reliable recovery of critical applications at remote recovery sites. As an option to Veritas Storage Foundation by Symantec, Volume Replicator enables efficient replication of data over IP networks, giving organizations an extremely flexible, high-performance alternative to traditional array-based replication architectures.

The challenge of easily procuring new technology is the Old Faithful of federal IT. Regardless of the year, it’s an issue that keeps coming up. In fact, judging by a recent survey of federal IT pros at SolarWinds, procurement challenges are erupting more than ever before.

I am not going to go into the holy war of the JSON vs YAML discussion. That is something that should be left to folks that have time and willingness to discuss this, just like discussions of OS X vs Windows vs Linux, or VMware vs Xen, or iOS vs Android, or …the list could continue way past this blog. But this blog is not to discuss either/or. It is to show you a way to convert from one to another to ease the pain of dealing with one or the other side. Let’s take a simple JSON template for DynamoDB table creation in AWS.