In this edition: Symantec CTO: Enterprise Security Still Needs Humans; As Data Centers Consolidate, Those Remaining Need to be More Efficient; Complexity is Cybersecurity’s Real Enemy; Cybersecurity Challenges in 2013; GitHub Hires First Government Liaison.

How's your virtualization and data center consolidation strategy progressing? Have you hit a plateau after virtualizing everything you can? With all eyes firmly fixed on the cloud, why would I bring up virtualization? Virtualization has come and gone, everyone's done it, there's nothing left. Right? Not so fast.

Much ado is being made these days about consolidation and reducing the cost of IT, with virtualization being the drivers for storage management improvements. The truth is that storage management, as well as application management and OS management, has always been a critical component of data centers. The fact that virtualization puts more pressure on these tasks is no excuse for overlooking them to date. Virtualization and “cloud” initiatives are increasing the demand on data centers to the point that they have no choice but to seek efficiencies. Or perhaps it is budget pressure that offers no choice and the storage demands of virtualization and cloud initiatives are making it harder to realize the savings.

Data protection is an essential part of every IT strategy. A good data protection plan minimizes the risk of downtime and data loss as well as the risk of a compliance incident. Most enterprise level data protection implementations are complex, costly and require thoughtful planning to ensure that the risk of data loss is reduced to an acceptable level. As with any technology there is no shortage of catch phrases to distract the overburdened administrator as well as the budget conscious executive. Phrases like “Integrated Data Protection”, “Industry Leading”, “End to End” and yes, even “cloud”. Let’s face it. The only reason you spend a dime on this stuff is to reduce risk because risk adds cost to your operation. The cost of data re-entry, the cost of down time or the cost of compliance fines. How simple or complex the system that you create to deal with risk is not the issue. The issue is whether the cost of the system is less than the risk of doing nothing.

It is already the second half of August and we are quickly approaching a busy conference time for DLT. Up-coming events will take DLT all over the country, but some of the best are local ones happening just down the road. The annual Innovation Nation Forum, hosted by MeriTalk, will take place Tuesday, August 23 at the Washington Convention Center. Aiming to “Shake IT Up,” Innovation Nation will focus on three Federal IT hot topics- cloud computing, cybersecurity and data center consolidation.

The below blog was written by and published with permission by Steve O’Keeffe. Steve O’Keeffe is the founder of MeriTalk – www.meritalk.com – the government IT network. MeriTalk is an online community that hosts professional networking, thought leadership, and focused events to drive the government IT dialogue. A 20-year veteran of the government IT community, O’Keeffe has worked in government and industry. In addition to MeriTalk, he founded Telework Exchange, GovMark Council, and O’Keeffe & Company Sometimes great ideas run into roadblocks. That's when you need to think differently. Who could argue with today's data center consolidation direction? Green, secure, efficient – this is apple pie stuff. So, why is the Hill sending the platter back to the kitchen – and questioning the bill? Perhaps it's time to reconsider the recipe?

Managers in the Public Sector are wrestling with the wide range of options provided by the evolving Cloud services paradigm. Most are now familiar with the three Cloud service models (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) and more than a few are testing the waters. The proliferation of Cloud services from a wide range of name brand vendors and the success stories from commercial companies provides a certain level of confidence that government agencies can realize similar economies in shifting to the Cloud for at least some IT services. Indeed, OMB, in its ‘Cloud First’ policy, has mandated serious consideration of the Cloud by agencies as the federal Data Center Consolidation initiative is implemented.

As this is the first week of the first year of a new decade, predictions are in demand. Below are my predictions for Information Technology in the Federal, State, and Local public sector. I promise to revisit these predictions at the end of December to test their accuracy. Wink. Cloud Computing: Off and running, finally. In the last few months the Departments of Interior and Agriculture, and the General Services Administration have committed to the cloud for office productivity applications like Google Apps or Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite. Major cities including Los Angeles and New York have also made the decision to adopt cloud services. The latest buzz is that FedRAMP will be ready for prime time by April.