Yearly Archives: 2016

At the recent Major Cities Chiefs Association meeting New York, there was a lot of talk about NYPD’s sophisticated crime and terrorist nerve center, as well as its $80M price tag. Realistically, most communities don’t have the resources to create or manage such a system, so what are the options for everyone else? Hitachi Visualization provides many of the same capabilities on a scale that suits smaller organizations and is easy to deploy and manage. It can be the hub of an agency’s SMART Policing effort and grant opportunities can help make it happen without the Park Avenue budget.

Cloud isn’t a new concept for government. Approximately 8.5 percent – or roughly $7 billion – of the government’s IT spending goes to provisioned services like cloud today. But, even greater opportunity for savings is ahead, as agencies focus hard on legacy migration. The costs associated with maintaining outdated infrastructure have reached the impossible point. OMB’s legacy systems report, out last month, found many agencies use outdated, unsupported software languages and hardware parts.

A word of advice: If you’re “Friends” with your boss on Facebook, don’t post pictures of your wild Thursday night and call in “sick” on Friday. And if you just can’t help but upload that selfie with a margarita in hand, at least be selective about who can view that particular Facebook status. The folks at Facebook know that there is information that is OK for everyone to see and that there is information that should only be in the hands of certain people. That’s why they have cleverly devised a way to designate who sees certain status updates – so the wrong information doesn’t get into the hands of the wrong people.

The pressure is on for agencies to make the move to cloud – just 13 percent of Feds say they can deploy new systems as fast as required . However, agencies know cloud is here to stay. When it comes down to it, Feds are optimistic – 70 percent say increasing their cloud adoption pace will improve IT’s ability to innovate.

Learn how IT solution providers and system integrators are adapting marketing efforts to match new market dynamics and customer demands driven by changes in the channel, including the emergence of the strategic service provider model, next-generation managed services and the evolution of the buyer’s journey.

We’re in the midst of a revolution. A revolution that has been gaining momentum over the past 10 years which will “change the way humans interact with where we are, what we’re doing, and how we understand and characterize activity on Earth.” It’s a dramatic shift leaving many agencies with questions about how to become a part of it. According to a recent article outlining the 10 technology components that make up GEOINT, this movement is defined as “the derivation of information from imagery, geospatial data in all forms and analytics.” But that casts a wide net. Distilled down, it comes down to simply ingesting massive amounts of data, managing it in an efficient platform, using analytics to derive actionable intelligence and making this information available to the right people at the right time. When done properly, it becomes a cycle, building on existing insights, layering on new data to identify trends which can lead to predictive analytics. Sounds complicated, right? It doesn’t have to be.

To score a home run, you have to cover all the bases. But getting from start to finish is harder than it looks. For Federal agencies, hitting IT out of the park is even more difficult due to budget constraints, lengthy procurement processes, and staffing difficulties.

According to the April 14 article in FCW, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued the Managing Government Records Directive in 2012 but the clock is ticking on the deadline, which requires compliance by the end of 2016. The directive mandates federal agencies save email messages that qualify as temporary or permanent government records in an electronic format.

Today, just 13 percent of Feds say they can deploy new systems as quickly as required. And, it’s no secret agencies are being pushed to make the move to cloud – whether it’s data center consolidation initiatives, flexible performance to meet constituents’ on-demand requests, simply the desire to increase overall IT efficiency, or the demands of the current regulatory environment.

There’s a war occurring across our country. You can’t see it, but the effects are clear and it’s no longer a quiet one. According to last month’s MIT Technology Review, the Pentagon has gone public with its strategy to deploy an army of hackers in what is being called “America’s First Cyberwar.” Cyber security is the new frontier for fighting global terror groups like ISIS and at the center of this battle is big data and cyber analytics.