Technically Speaking

Data leaks, data breaches, blah, blah, blah. Sometimes the attention-grabbing headlines just sound like too much noise. What’s lacking in most of today’s reporting is the real truth about how government agencies are hacked and what agencies are doing to counter those attacks. Those are the details that can help agencies improve their defenses to face future challenges.

When news broke last month that the Pentagon is still using 1970s-era floppy disks to run its nuclear program, most of us expressed incredulity. Unless you happen to work for the federal government that is. According to federal CIO Tony Scott, the U.S. government spends 76% of its $88 billion IT budget on operating and maintaining out-of-date technologies – that’s three times what is spent on modern systems.

Growing data volumes and burgeoning virtual workloads are putting increasing pressure on public sector data center power and storage systems, while also taking a toll on staff and tax payer dollars. Performance silos, forklift upgrades and increasing licensing costs are forcing organizations to change how they do business. But agencies can turn this situation around in a flash!

Data backup is a fundamental part of good IT and business management. But in the public sector it’s also the law. Established by President Obama in 2011, the National Archives and Records Administration maintains a comprehensive backup of all records of important transactions, actions, and other communications. Although data backup sounds like a simple enough concept, the actual practice of consistently performing reliable backups and staying compliant with mandates and regulations offers up many significant challenges:

Building Information Modeling (BIM) isn’t a concept that springs to mind for enabling the delivery of reliable, high-quality electric service. Yet, BIM is increasingly helping U.S. and global utilities deliver more reliable, higher quality service.

Disasters such as weather, earthquakes, fire, cyber-attacks, terrorism and even human error, have all impacted government systems at one point or another and will continue to do so.