MeriTalk today announced the winners of its inaugural FITARA Awards program, recognizing six Federal agencies who have made tremendous strides in modernizing their IT environments and one congressional leader who has worked tirelessly to promote the reform of IT acquisitions and adoption of cyber best practices. […]

Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk. […]

There are many emerging technologies designed to help Federal managers optimize their data centers and operate their information technology infrastructures more efficiently. But with so many new choices, how do agencies pick the best solutions? […]

Government agencies may finally be getting a handle on cloud, according to a major cloud service provider, as the breadth of Federal use cases in the cloud expands rapidly. […]

Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk. […]

Dr. Tom Leighton, chief executive officer of cloud service provider Akamai, said Thursday that data center defense on its own is woefully inadequate to handle capacity available at the edge of the network to launch distributed attacks. […]

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee advanced 14 bills out of its business meeting today, including legislation to protect against drone threats and to establish a framework for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that will improve data sharing across DHS’s numerous component agencies. […]

The possibilities of quantum computing have been floating on the horizon for a while now, at least since renowned physicist Richard Feynman dreamed up the idea in 1982. But like the horizon itself (at least in a world that isn’t flat), it always seems to recede despite all efforts to close in on it. Until now. […]

Can software-defined storage help support the data center modernization efforts of Federal agencies and help them meet ambitious Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) milestones? […]

Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk. […]

Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk. […]

We sat down with Jeff Henry, president of ViON, in his office in Herndon, Va. The typical tech provider surroundings belied the epic changes at ViON, as it morphs from leading data center reseller to delivering government IT modernization as a service. […]

The Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA), passed by Congress in December 2014, represented the first major legislative overhaul of Federal IT in nearly 20 years. Beginning in November 2015, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released two scorecards a year grading agencies’ performance under the law. Suffice to say, agencies haven’t always been making the GAO’s Honor Roll, with plenty of Cs and Ds to go around. However, many agencies have made significant improvements over the last 3 years. […]

The House Oversight and Government Reform (OGR) IT subcommittee followed up last week’s release of the sixth FITARA Scorecard (Scorecard 6.0) by releasing a second, more detailed scorecard. It provides insight into each of the categories of FITARA scoring, with methodology, metrics, calculations, and detailed data points on just how well each of the 24 agencies fared.  […]

Federal agencies might not meet the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) data center closure goals, according to a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. Based on current projections, only 7,221 of the 12,062 data centers that agencies reported in August 2017 will be closed by September of this year. […]

As part of its accelerated push toward commercial cloud services, the Defense Department has ordered more than 100 data centers in what DoD calls its “Fourth Estate” agencies to migrate their applications to milCloud 2.0, a commercially run cloud hosted by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). […]

The Federal government has a massive data center footprint: 6.76 million square feet, to be precise. Of its total portfolio, an astonishing 62 percent of all floor center space goes unused. To add insult to injury, it’s extremely expensive to maintain all that unused space. […]

Federal data center teams will have a new member suiting up this summer to help drive efficiency and optimization. And this team member doesn’t take vacations or lunch breaks. […]

In a move that will help save the Federal government $695 million over the next 10 years, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is “reshaping and reorganizing [its] Computing Ecosystem.” The first part of the reorganization is shuttering the doors of its St. Louis data center. […]

A new study finds that the public is warming up to the use of biometric identification technology, but remains wary of tracking applications and is looking to government to set standards in that area. […]

Federal government officials and a member of Congress influential in government IT spending debates said late last month that billions of additional savings look to be ripe for the picking through elimination of duplicative services, and that Congress is working on ways to beef up the pursuit of those savings. […]

While the Federal government continues to preach IT modernization and data center shutdowns, the odds are mounting. […]

Machine learning innovation is kicking into high gear. Investment in this field and data science increased 9.3 percent in 2016 to $2.4 billion, according to Gartner. On top of that, the Federal government is increasing its focus on machine learning, with the MGT Act, Technology Modernization Fund, and the President’s Management Agenda all supporting transformation efforts. […]

The Government Accountability Office–GAO–released a report exploring how Medicare beneficiary data are being shared with external organizations. When caring for patient record data, it seems government needs a better bedside manner and more. […]

Government employees are playing Russian roulette every time they open their inbox. […]

The journey to meet the requirements of the Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) has been long, difficult, and full of roadblocks–and, from the back seat, we can hear anxious voices asking when the trip will be over. With the extension earlier this year of the 2018 DCOI deadline to 2020, agencies are clearly still looking for the right routes to take. […]

Federal IT comes with some baggage–much of its data is trapped in legacy technologies.  Agencies can’t realistically pick everything up and move to more modern infrastructure.  So how do they bridge the gap?  MeriTalk’s latest report found that improving data sharing between new and legacy systems is the number one solution to accelerating Federal IT modernization.  The “Modernizing the Monolith” study explores why legacy systems are so persistent and outlines a path to modernizing with them, instead of in spite of them. […]

Government IT leaders may feel a little punch drunk lately. Between new mandates, an understaffed workforce, and aging systems–they are getting hit from all angles. Indeed, Chad Sheridan, CIO for USDA’s Risk Management Agency kicked off his keynote at last Thursday’s Veritas Public Sector Vision Day in Washington, D.C. by quoting Mike Tyson: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” […]

The House subcommittees on Information Technology and Government Operations held a “State of Play” Federal IT Hearing Wednesday for the latest updates on ongoing modernization efforts, and the tone was resolute and unflinching. […]

Cloud computing is now powering the next generation of technology–from artificial intelligence (AI) to Internet of Things (IoT) to machine learning, offering government agencies scalability and agility to support and analyze a massive influx of data for more informed decision making. […]