IT security threats are getting increasingly sophisticated – zero-day threats, propagating worms, and low-and-slow attacks – each of which defy most detection mechanisms and keep CISOs increasingly on their toes.

According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), over 25,500 data incidents at federal agencies occurred in 2013 alone. Breaches in 2014 also occurred in highly visible agencies like the White House, State Department and Postal Service just to name a few.  To avoid being on GAO’s 2015 report, agencies need to take a 3-step approach to prevent data breaches:

1. Implement real-time network visibility

IT organizations have never been as well equipped to deal with sophisticated security threats as they are today. But at the same time, IT organizations have never been at greater risk.

Despite putting in place policies, controls, technologies and so on, cyber adversaries have never been in a greater position of strength. According to DLT partner, ForeScout, attackers are increasingly coordinated and have a wealth of resources to draw from, including hacking communities, organized crime, and nation states.

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.

With the recent data breach at OPM, the spotlight has firmly been on federal data breaches and the vulnerabilities that expose sensitive employee and citizen information to would-be hackers.

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.

If you weren’t able to make it to Boston this June for the 2015 Red Hat Summit, not to worry, you can now check out the presentation videos, slides, and recaps from the Summit online.

Before you dive in, watch the recap video below:

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.

Should your agency move data or applications to the private or public cloud? But those aren’t the only options. Other choices include a community cloud, a multi-tenant infrastructure that is shared among several organizations from a specific group with common computing concerns. Then there’s the hybrid cloud which composes two or more of the above (private, public or community).