Technically Speaking

The theme of the recent ICIT Forum was “Rise of the Machines”, a call to recognize the vulnerability of an infrastructure increasingly under control of computers.  The steady increase in connected systems mandates a broad range of strategies – managing supply-chain risk, analysis of huge amounts of data through machine learning, dealing with the insider-threat problem, sealing up holes in applications.  I had the privilege of discussing threat intelligence sharing on a panel with Todd Helfrich of Anomali, John Kupcinsky of KPMG, and Ana Besk

Oh DevOps, DevOps. You hear time and again how it’s the future of application development and deployment. You’re told you need to implement it and engrain its best practices across your organization. But making a shift from the old way of doing things, however error-prone, slow, or disruptive it may be in comparison to the agility and utility that DevOps promises, is no easy task.

The U.S. government is making a big shift towards open source, in part due to the cost savings (the government spends about $6 billion per year on software licenses) but also because it speeds up innovation and returns value to the tax payer.

It will come as no surprise to anyone that 2016 saw an alarming increase in targeted attacks aimed at politically motivated sabotage and subversion. This new level of ambition by cyber criminals is corroborated by the annual Internet Security Threat Report from DLT partner, Symantec. The perceived success of several campaigns – particularly the U.S.

As the federal government continues to navigate the transition of the new administration, the imperative is on new political appointees to understand and adhere to records management rules and regulations while safeguarding classified and other personally identifiable information (PII). All this, of course, against the backdrop of exponential records growth, budgetary challenges, and other mission pressures.

Has your agency or organization’s AEC project taken Building Information Modeling (BIM) to the next level? Now’s your chance to showcase your innovation with your peers via the Autodesk 2017 AEC Excellence Awards. You can enter up to five projects among four categories: Infrastructure, Building, Construction, and Sustainability.