Earlier this spring, Symantec released its 2015 Internet Security Threat Report and as you can imagine the findings were pretty scary (if you don’t want to download the entire report, you can read the summary here).

The IRS breach was exceedingly low-tech: it’s at the other end of the spectrum from the infamous and sophisticated Chinese hacking operations. This was just a bunch of bad actors who stole – or bought on the black market – personally identifiable information (PII) on a large number of American taxpayers. They accessed the IRS “Get Transcript” application, and provided answers (or educated guesses) in response to personal questions about their victims. This allowed them to access tax returns and other filings, facilitating lucrative identity thefts in the future.

At DLT Solutions, we are seeing a pattern emerge with the types of workloads being deployed to public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms by our customers. DLT primarily engages the Public Sector and Educational entities, so the relevance of our observed trends rests there.

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.

Running a large organization, private or public sector, requires a lot of IT and as technology has changed and matured data centers have exploded in number and size.

As data centers grow in operational costs in a climate of shrinking IT budgets, efficiencies are being sought out in all areas; from people to support the equipment, the real estate that equipment occupies in the data center, to the power needed to both run the servers and to cool the building.

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.

Government agencies are under increasing pressure to move to more agile development and operational methodologies. But what does this mean for existing legacy environments? Actually, agile development and operational methodologies can be achieved in legacy environments. The answer to this problem is rooted in IT automation, which serves three purposes:

Cloud security has always been a concern among government IT and business leaders.

According to a recent survey by the Society of Information Technology Management, 47% of public sector IT professionals surveyed would not use the cloud for IT services involving personal data or business-critical functions. (Source: Computer Weekly).

One of the most maddening aspects of being a software developer, and specifically a Java software developer, is the constant task of ensuring your application platform is up to date so that your application is not exposed to security or other defect vulnerabilities. It is challenging enough to ensure your code meets the customer requirements and is maintainable by different resources by ever-decreasing timelines over the course of its life.

Insider threats are a persistent problem for government agencies and it’s no longer an IT problem. According to DailyCaller.com, 21% of breaches can be traced back to security indiscretions by federal workers (although other source point to the number being as high as 50%).

So it’s no surprise that preventing and mitigating these threats was a hot topic at this year’s Symantec Government Symposium in Washington, D.C.