Public sector organizations face more data challenges today than ever before. As discovered via research performed by North Highland Consulting, the top issues government organizations face include:

“Dark data” – by that we mean data that’s been stored away in some IT system and untouched for years, is about to come out of the shadows.

Thanks to big data technologies it’s become easier than ever to extract new business value from information assets that haven been collected, processed and stored away (either because they’d served their purpose or were required to be kept for compliance reasons).

Not using, analyzing, or even accessing that data not only inflates storage costs, it could also leave that data vulnerable to the mismanagement of sensitive data.

With fewer resources than the private sector, yet faced with the same threats, the U.S. government is dealing with a complex dilemma. Both the public and government employees demand accountability for data breaches, but few understand the challenges that federal CIOs face – hiring and keeping specialized talent, paying for the hardware and software, and keeping pace with changing political agendas.

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.

Data breach after data breach – attacks on federal IT systems are becoming a regular occurrence. And, as the true scope and impact of the recent cyberattack on OPM’s systems continues to unravel (read our 8 facts about the OPM breach to learn more) – cybersecurity has moved firmly center state as the White House’s number one priority.

In the wake of the recent announcement of a massive data breach at the federal government’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM), blame was quickly laid at the door of state-sponsored Chinese hackers (although U.S. officials fell short of an all-out accusation).

While China denies any involvement, cybersecurity analysts suggest that the breach carried all the hallmarks of a state-sponsored attack, such as evidence of highly organized teams that focus on the same targets, often for years, and outside of regular hours.

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.

How to utilize multiple data streams and multiplexing with Veritas NetBackup
 

Since the time of my last blog on tuning NetBackup, there have been several advances on how to utilize cloud storage in your overall data protection strategy.

There’s lots of talk these days about how government technology innovation is being held back by legacy environments, so it’s refreshing to hear that cloud adoption by government agencies is set to “skyrocket”. That’s according to a new report by Forbes Insights.