California IT Security Officials Still Wary of Cloud Computing

How secure is sensitive data that’s hosted offsite? Should IT workers and contractors be required to pass background checks? Will legislation ever catch up to the nonstop momentum that pushes technological advances?

These and other topics were discussed at the Managing Technology conference Thursday, March 18. On-hand to share their expertise and experiences were Nevada Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Christopher Ipsen, California CISO Mark Weatherford, Los Angeles County CISO Robert Pittman, and Dale Jablonsky, CIO of the California Employment Development Department.

“Public trust is what we’re all about,” Jablonsky said. Governments must protect citizens’ private information, such as Social Security numbers, addresses and health information, before databases are hacked and the press gets wind. “It’s up to the government to prevent those headlines.”

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first published week of:   03/22/2010

Carole Wallace Post Named New York City's IT Commissioner

The search committee in charge of finding a replacement for retiring New York City IT Commissioner Paul Cosgrave didn’t have to look far.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg tapped Carole Wallace Post, who had served as director of agency services in the Mayor’s Office of Operations, as the new commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT). She is the agency’s first female commissioner.

Post said at a press conference Wednesday, Dec. 30, 2009 that under her leadership DoITT would continue working to consolidate IT infrastructure, put city services online, establish enterprise solutions for common citywide functions, and make citizen-to-government interactions easier and more efficient.

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first published week of:   01/04/2010

CIOs Project Continued Local Government IT Budget Cuts

Local government IT departments will continue to endure the impact of the sluggish economy for the next two years, according to a national survey conducted by the Public Technology Institute and Input.

The survey, sent to CIOs and IT executives nationwide, showed that 50 percent of local government IT budgets will be cut over the next couple of years, a number that’s on par with last year’s results.

“At one point technology was looked at as a way to save money,” said Alan Shark, executive director and CEO of the Public Technology Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based national, nonprofit technology research and development organization. “Now, local governments are being asked to cut an awful lot to save the sinking ship.”

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first published week of:   10/25/2010

City project to link law-enforcement databases

The city is spearheading a new project that will allow all law enforcement and firefighters in Yuma County to access each other’s computer databases in real time and on the road. The Regional Communications System (YRCS) interoperability project, which is being paid for entirely by federal money, should be completed by 2012.

New World Systems is in charge of installing the system and will provide the YRCS agencies with Aegis Computer Aided Dispatch, Records Management, Mobile Computing, Corrections Management and Field-Based Reporting software.

New World is also providing its Aegis Link, a Web-based interoperability solution to enable complete information sharing between separate agencies.

Every emergency vehicle will be equipped with a computer that is connected to every emergency database in the county, the National Crime Information System and the FBI database.

That means if a crime has occurred in San Luis and the perpetrator is pulled over in Wellton a short time later, the deputies there will know instantly of the crime and can arrest the suspect instead of letting them go out of ignorance.

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first published week of:   11/08/2010

Cloud Computing and government agencies: just pie in the sky?

GovLoop has teamed up with Federal Computer Week (FCW) to stage "The FCW Challenge."  We're asking six questions, then presenting our community's feedback to thought leaders for a direct response. Comments may appear in a final series of articles in the June issue of FCW. CIO Vivek Kundra wants every agency to jump into the cloud, but can he put them off the plane? He doesn’t really have the incentives or sanctions he needs to make this happen.

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first published week of:   05/17/2010

Cloud security: Feds on cusp of change

The federal government is on the cusp of fundamental changes in the way it manages information-technology security risks, but those risks will grow more complicated as agencies begin embracing on-demand computing, according to a panel of public-sector, cloud-computing experts. The discussion was part of a May 4 technology conference on cloud computing, knowledge management and opengovernment innovations. Sponsored by 1105 Government Information Group, the convention took place in Washington, D.C. Coincidentally, the Treasury Department confirmed on the same day that it had shut down four Web sites hosted by a cloudservice provider after a security analyst found malicious code. Security in a cloud computing environment needs to be considered as three distinct areas, said the director of Cisco’s Cloud and Virtualization Solutions. Security risks - and rules duplicating the work agencies must go through to certify the security of their information systems - remain one of the biggest obstacles to adopting cloud-computing strategies, said a computer scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technologies and vice chair of the federal government’s Interagency Cloud Computing Advisory Council. He outlined how a new government program called FedRAMP aims to address that problem by streamlining the certification process, so that an information-technology application certified for one agency will be available for all agencies to use. This would help industry too, he said.

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first published week of:   05/10/2010

Volume 31

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