There’s been a lot of buzz about blockchain in 2017. It was only a few months ago in March 2017 that Betanews predicted that blockchain would be the buzzword that would take 2017 by storm. And it did, expanding beyond the financial community where it’s had a home for several years and breaking into other enterprise sectors.

But few foretold that blockchain would have such a hand in government digital transformation in 2017. In fact, the two go hand in hand.

What is Blockchain?

The use of blockchain technology by government agencies is moving at a fast pace. In the past few months, both the Department of Defense and Department of State are reported to be eyeing the technology behind the cryptocurrency, Bitcoin.

What is Blockchain Technology?

“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.

The “Internet of Things” isn’t exactly a new concept, Kevin Ashton coined the term the Internet of Things as far back as 1999. Now, 15 years later, the Department of Defense (DoD) is eager to exploit it.

What is the Internet of Things?

There’s no getting away from the number one threat to the U.S this year – cybercrime.

So you may want to clear your calendar for the Symantec Government Symposium. This ever popular one-day event takes place on April 15, 2015, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C.

According to Federal Computer Week, federal agencies spend almost half of their annual IT budgets on supporting legacy applications. Even more worrying, about 47% of the government’s existing IT applications are based on legacy technology that needs modernizing.

While digital government innovation is on the rise, as evidenced by websites like Healthcare.gov and numerous state and local intra-agency and citizen-centric services, the underlying IT systems required to support these innovations – the middleware – is struggling to keep up.

5 Things Every Agency Should Know About Procuring Cloud Services

If your agency is making the move to cloud services, it can expect cost-savings, improved service delivery, and all the great things that the cloud brings. But for procurement and purchasing officials whose practices and contracting vehicles were designed to help managers provision hardware and software, not on-demand services like the cloud, it can all cause a bit of a frenzy.

What can government agencies expect from cloud computing in 2015?

IDC Government Insights recently released its worldwide predictions for 2015 and predicts that governments will increasingly draw on cloud computing to underpin and enable a number of key initiatives.

While we’ve been busy fretting about Ebola and the Islamic State, in 2014 cybersecurity trumped terrorism as the number one threat to the U.S.

Despite investing billions in cybersecurity, federal, state and local agencies are struggling to keep pace with ever-evolving threats.

Let’s take a look at the biggest cybersecurity threats of 2014 (so far) and steps the federal as well as state and local government can take to stop them.

The Government Workforce

CAD News for Govies is a weekly feature on Acronym that scans thousands of industry articles to present you with a regular source of CAD and GIS news, information and ideas that impact the public sector. Here’s the latest round-up:

Integrated Design Workflow Videos using Revit 2013 and 2014