2015 was an unprecedented cyber security wake-up call to federal government agencies culminating in the catastrophic and long-undetected breach at the OPM, which compromised over 21 million background check records. The barrage of attacks has since been relentless culminating most recently with a Department of Justice breach which leaked contact information for thousands of FBI and Homeland Security personnel.

Today, Autodesk announced the addition of advanced features to its flagship civil engineering solution – Autodesk InfraWorks 360.

AEC Magazine recently featured four of the top Autodesk University (AU) online classes that help CAD managers stay ahead of their ever-changing field. One of these classes – Becoming an Awesome CAD/BIM/Tech Manager – is actually about “you” and not the technology you use. After all, as a manager you’re a people person now, not just a tech user, and that requires becoming a better “you”!

The Internet of Things will continue to balloon while we’ll all still struggle with extracting value from Big Data. Those are the headline predictions from DLT partner and IT asset management leader, BDNA, in its 2016 IT Predictions Report.

BDNA did a solid job of predicting the trends that dominated enterprise IT in 2015, so we’re curious to see how this year’s forecast will pan out.

Here’s a snapshot of what we can expect:

With the explosion of IoT sensors and devices, the data available to us is getting bigger and bigger. It’s a particular challenge facing federal agencies, especially in light of NARA’s Capstone compliance initiative, as well as an opportunity.

2016 is the year in which DevOps will go mainstream, predicts Gartner. But what does the Silicon Valley culture of agile development practices, open source, and DevOps culture mean for the government sector?

Bandwidth is one of those things we all take for granted, like electric power we don’t really pay attention to it until it’s gone. Then we get disgruntled.

So when an application is running slowly or a file won’t load, we tend to go straight to the IT helpdesk and complain about how slow the network seems to be. But is it really the bandwidth?

With Autodesk’s 2017 software release on the horizon (typically sometime in the third week of March), now is a good time to start thinking about training options that can help you get up to speed when the new versions become available.

Ongoing education is particularly important if you are an Autodesk Subscription customer. Subscription customers receive the latest Autodesk software as and when it’s released, so new features and capabilities are being added all the time, and may present a potential learning curve.

Computers have traditionally been a passive tool, they respond to our programming and input. But computers are getting increasingly savvy and more creative.

Imagine being able to tell your PC what your design goals are, what you want to achieve, the constraints you’re dealing with, and then the computer goes off and explores a solution. It’s called “generative design” and Autodesk CTO, Jeff Kowalski believes it will redefine computer-aided design.

If you work with Autodesk Revit software then you may already be familiar with A360 Collaboration for Revit a powerful collaboration service that connects project teams with centralized access to BIM project data in the cloud.