Technically Speaking

2019 is off to a great start for anyone in the business of working with data in the public sector.  President Trump signed the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act on January 14th, and with it, the OPEN Government Data Act has finally become law.[1]

Expert Panel: The Challenges and Opportunities for Modernizing Data Protection As online data has become ubiquitous, managing that data has become as important an endeavor as amassing and storing it. A host of issues surround data management, not the least of which is security. But many others loom as data increases exponentially both in size and in importance.

DevOps became part of the fashionable lexicon for software development a few years ago. The government, at least here and there, has adopted the concept enthusiastically. More recently and with growing urgency, the syllable “Sec” – for security – has joined the DevOps concept. Many federal IT shops call it DevSecOps.

Article by Brandon Shopp, Vice President, Product Strategy, SolarWinds A recent report regarding the modernization of Federal Information Technology (IT), coordinated by the American Technology Council (ATC) last year, called for agencies to “identify solutions to current barriers regarding agency cloud adoption.”

2019 will be the year of the hybrid cloud, claim federal executives. As offices like FedRAMP, OMB, and GSA continue to promote cloud computing as the path to IT modernization, hybrid cloud can help alleviate the regulatory compliance and security requirements that agencies must adhere to. With a hybrid strategy, agencies can maintain legacy applications and an on-premise infrastructure, while leveraging the public cloud for extra storage or compute power as needed, or when they need to introduce new services.

The state of our nation’s infrastructure is grim. The most recent report card from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave U.S. infrastructure an overall score of “D” for “poor” or “at risk”.