Technically Speaking

It has been 10 years since the U.S. government began warming to cloud computing, beginning with the federal Cloud First initiative in 2010 leading to today’s Cloud Smart strategy – a game plan for bringing processes and applications into a new hardware environment.But to take advantage full advantage of a cloud-driven ecosystem, the government must have more than just a cloud strategy. Agencies also need a data strategy.What is a cloud data strategy?

Since the release of the final Federal Data Strategy Action Plan (henceforth FDSAP) the end of last year, much has been written about the Federal Data Strategy. However, little has been written to connect the important role it can play in enabling the adoption of AI within the federal public sector.

Is data the new bacon? The world’s most valuable resource? That fuel that powers the digital enterprise? The most successful companies in the world – Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, etc. – use data to drive business strategies. Being insight-driven isn’t just the domain of consumer tech. Government agencies rely on data to make informed and quick decision making, enhance productivity, improve transparency and build trust with citizens, eliminate fraud and abuse, reduce crime and security threats, and more.

2019 has ended with more uncertainty than normal—even than the federal government is used to. Last year at this time, of course, Christmas brought the advent of a record-long lapse in appropriations for about half the departments and agencies. The exceptions of Homeland Security, Defense and Veterans Affairs kept IT dollars flowing, but the partial shutdown left its mark nonetheless. The ugly impeachment process working its way down the hall from the house to the Senate might be a psychic distraction but will have no effect on IT procurement.

SolarWinds (NYSE:SWI), a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT management software, today announced that the SolarWinds® Orion® Suite for Federal Government v4.0 is undergoing evaluation for Common Criteria to Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 2+ under the Netherlands Scheme for Certification in the Area of IT Security (NSCIB).

Hot off the heels of last week’s Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference, we sat down with DLT’s Chief Technology Officer, David Blankenhorn, to discuss the current state of the Cloud and what drivers will fuel more innovation and adoption for the U.S. public sector in 2020. There have been a few big agenda items for the cloud community to digest this year – what is the current state of U.S. public sector cloud adoption and usage?