Technically Speaking

Agencies are dealing with an exponential growth of data. But size isn’t the only problem. It’s where that data lives and how it travels between the private clouds, public clouds, and back to on-premises. How do you protect, secure, and backup that data? How can your agency protect the right data and invest only in what is important to the mission, without creating a new set of data silos, incurring hidden storage costs, stalling developers, and introducing greater compliance risk?

Federal fiscal year-end (FFYE) is a harried time for the federal procurement system. As agencies hustle to spend their “use-it-or-lose-it” budgets, contracting officers are under peak pressure to obtain maximum value for the money they spend on property and services, ensure compliance with statutory and regulatory requirements in awarding contracts, and so on.

Securing government networks and systems takes a village. Keeping pace with attacks and shortage of security talent has driven security operations to pool data resources and orchestrate actions across vendors, open source projects, and internal development efforts. It’s a community effort. Sharing threat information and codifying procedures to better fend off the enemy with no face. This kind of intel also improves detection efforts and response through collaboration across systems.

With a constant influx of data, one of the biggest challenges facing government agencies is determining “What is the right data?” or “What data does my agency need for mission success?” Then, once the data is discovered, how do you make that data actionable? How do you integrate and visualize it for better insights?

Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) is a relatively new concept. It was not that long ago when agencies measured digital service performance simply by how fast a web page loaded. Today, things are far more complex.

The Cyber Shield Act, commissioned by Senator Ed Markey, recommends the establishment of a voluntary program to institute uniform cybersecurity and data benchmarks for consumer devices. The goal of the bill is to improve consumer decision making from the point of purchase, standardized by industry and maintained by manufacturers – similar to an EPA energy rating on appliances, or NHTSA safety rating on automobiles.