The Most Critical Skills Gap: Cybersecurity

Since Target’s hack back in 2013, cybersecurity has been top of mind for organizations, especially those with sensitive information. However, the talent pool of those who are skilled in intrusion detection, secure software development and attack mitigation is not growing at the same rate as the demand. Many reasons contribute to this disconnect, including a lack of training in higher education and a 53% increase in need.

Cloud computing is no doubt on the mind of IT teams at every college and university. But moving to the cloud isn’t just an IT decision. The unique culture within Higher Ed impacts how cloud buying decisions are made. For example, students inhabit a multi-platform world and expect interoperability across devices and desktops. Funding and procurement is another consideration.

It's finally here!

Amazon Web Services (AWS) just announced that the Elastic File System (or "EFS") is a live production service. The service is provisioned out of three regions currently: US-EAST-1, US-WEST-2, and EU-WEST-1.

EFS was originally announced over a year ago at AWS re:Invent in 2015. By AWS standards, the service has been in "preview" for quite some time. I'll admit to you, I was getting a little skeptical that it was going to make it out of preview, but hey, it's good to be wrong sometimes.

Is your agency using the cloud for CAD or any other related digital design work?

From cloud-based apps that let you work on any computer or device to the amazing computer power that you can access for less money than buying traditional software, the cloud is a wonderful thing.

How are BIM, cloud, big data and data management technologies changing the way our utilities infrastructure is designed and managed? Here are four fast facts:

1) BIM

Sure, BIM has made it easier to share 3D intelligent models of infrastructure design projects, but BIM is more than a 3D model. It's and entire process for creating and using that model across planning, design, and infrastructure management phases.

Keeping pace with changes in enterprise-level technology is no easy feat. For education institutions and universities, in particular, making sense of the available options for managing complex operational and technological infrastructures can be mind-boggling.

The importance of cloud computing in this mix can’t be underestimated. Today, nearly 70% of higher education institutions in North America have moved or are moving systems to the cloud, while 50% have adopted cloud-based collaboration systems.

Cloud, enhanced service delivery, improved collaboration, all common goals and challenges for governments of all types. Yet one common thread runs through most agencies, regardless of their strategic goals and missions – over-burdened systems.

On February 11, Red Hat announced its newest release – Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.5 (RHEV for short).  This latest upgrade to Red Hat’s open source virtualization platform promises to deliver greater visibility into provisioning, configuring and monitoring of virtualization infrastructures and tighter integration with the OpenStack cloud infrastructure platform.

With more and more software and services being offloaded to the cloud and the surge in big government data, the speed of your storage still matters – very much.

Cloud is a big investment, and the pace of adoption over the past few years has reflected this with agencies albeit tip toeing towards cloud. In the past 12 months, however, the cloud is on the move, with IDC Government Insights predicting that a 25% growth in the sourcing of government clouds will drive cross-governmental initiatives by 2018.