Virtual desktop infrastructure accommodates employees working from home, replicating the office environment from any location.
Prior to the spring of 2020, the state of North Dakota was a lot like most governments when it came to its experience with remote workers. Usually, its offices were open — most agency employees never worked from home.
“We’d get a snow day once in a while,” recalls North Dakota CTO Duane Schell, “but even then, most things just shut down. It wasn’t like everyone suddenly had to telework.”
For those who did, the team in the state’s IT division had grown to rely on VMware Horizon, a virtual desktop infrastructure solution that gives employees easy and secure access to everything they’d have on their computers at work, Schell says. “Mostly, we used it to virtualize applications that were sensitive to network performance,” he explains. That included programs used by North Dakota’s geographic information systems team, for example. It also included the computer-aided design applications the state’s engineers needed to do their jobs.
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first published week of: 04/26/2021
The General Services Administration’s SAM.gov is no longer in beta.
It should now be easier for federal procurement and IT officials to post contract opportunities to modernize their agencies’ technology.
In late May the General Services Administration completed the integration of beta.SAM.gov and SAM.gov, meaning the beta site is no more and the updated SAM.gov “is now the system used to register to do business with the federal government, search for contract opportunities, find wage determinations, and more,” the agency said in a statement.
GSA says the updated website is easier to use and includes “major updates to security, design, and functionality.”
The updates include a single sign-on across multiple applications and data sets, a centralized workspace to manage work, improved security, stronger search functionality and an enhanced homepage design.
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first published week of: 07/12/2021
The proposal would create new positions, including software development, software engineering and data scientists.
The federal government would finally be able to hire specifically for “software development,” “software engineering,” “data management,” and “knowledge management” positions under new legislation before the House.
Over multiple administrations, the federal government has tried to get better at hiring and retaining tech-savvy employees but continues to meet challenges, including the lack of specific job roles for positions that are critical to creating a digitally-driven government.
The Federal Career Opportunities in Computer Science Work Act looks to remedy that for four such positions. The bill—introduced by Reps. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., and Peter Welch, D-Vt.—would give the Office of Personnel Management 270 days to establish roles for software development, software engineering, data scientist and knowledge management.
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first published week of: 07/26/2021
Sacramento, CA, Chattanooga, TN, Houston and Philadelphia are taking a variety of approaches to get residents access to critically needed broadband service.
The coronavirus pandemic has exposed many fault lines in American society, but one that quickly became remarkably visible is the digital divide, a term used for decades that has lately described those who have access to broadband internet and those who do not.
Even before the pandemic fully took hold in the United States, the digital divide was a yawning chasm. A report released in February from the company BroadbandNow found the Federal Communications Commission’s estimate that 21 million Americans lack access to broadband actually undercounts the figure by 20 million.
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first published week of: 04/05/2021
Agencies can use a breakthrough in federal funding for cloud-based infrastructure and tools for hybrid work.
State and local governments started to breathe a little easier in March when President Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act into law. The measure includes $350 billion in total funding for state, local and tribal governments, which have been battered by revenue losses during the coronavirus pandemic.
As the National Association of Counties notes, governments can use the funding for a variety of purposes, including responding to or mitigating the pandemic or its negative economic impacts; providing government services to the extent of the locality’s reduction in revenue; and making necessary investments in water, sewer or broadband infrastructure.
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first published week of: 07/12/2021
Dell PowerScale storage technology enables better analysis of vast troves of unstructured government data.
The Air Force captures all kinds of data while its planes fly. Sensors record weather information, the aircraft collects GPS mapping data and onboard systems track operational and airframe performance.
Usually that data would come into the Air Force in an “unstructured” form. The weather data would fall into one storage silo, the GPS data into another, and the performance statistics would stay in a separate storage unit.
If the service branch wanted to determine a relationship between, say, the weather and flight performance, it would have to process the information with algorithms that could communicate across silos to look for patterns and meaningful insights. The Air Force IT department would have to write specific code and bridging software to do that analysis and find a way to apply artificial intelligence across data sets.
Instead, with a different kind of storage system, all the unstructured files could flow into the same “data lake,” explains Dallas Nash, senior director of sales in Dell Technologies’ unstructured data solutions group.
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first published week of: 08/02/2021
Better implementation of basic cybersecurity, user training and comprehensive backup
Halfway through 2021, thousands of public and private sector organizations across the U.S. have already encountered high-stakes ransomware attacks. The frequency of such events, alongside the continued widespread need for remote work, has made data protection more important than ever. Cybercriminals have a pathway to an easy and profitable payday if these issues are not addressed.
The attacks the U.S. has endured this year have brought Americans’ daily lives to a halt. From attacking pipelines and disrupting gasoline supplies to halting meat production operations, cybercriminals know that many organizations will feel obligated to pay a ransom in order to keep their operations afloat. While the most high-profile recent attacks primarily targeted private organizations and government entities, academic institutions are also at risk.
The federal government has issued a wealth of guidance and is pushing numerous legislative efforts to protect itself and the private sector.
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first published week of: 08/30/2021
Lidar technology can improve pedestrian safety while safeguarding citizen privacy.
Cities are embracing connected and intelligent technologies and the data they generate to power a range of solutions that address challenges such as pedestrian safety, queue management, vehicle traffic management and more.
Lidar technology is emerging as a critical ingredient to smart city solutions with its ability to capture data essential for these systems. Cities can use it to take informed, timely actions that improve safety, efficiency and sustainability while also addressing civic application requirements to maintain public privacy.
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first published week of: 11/08/2021
Many are lagging on transitioning to a new network architecture under a critical General Services Administration contract.
In recent weeks, several large federal agencies have issued task orders under a governmentwide network modernization contract. However, there is growing concern that agencies are not making sufficient progress in transitioning their network assets to operate under the new contract in the face of looming deadlines.
The General Services Administration’s $50 billion Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions contract, or EIS, replaces the existing Networx contract and is designed to let agencies modernize their networks, especially via technologies such as software-defined networking and 5G.
Agencies had been required to transition away from the Networx contracting vehicle to EIS by spring 2020. However, in December 2018, the GSA extended the deadline to 2023 to give agencies more time to switch.
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first published week of: 10/25/2021
A recent NASCIO guide says state officials should run technology purchases by security officials much more often than they do.
Too often, IT purchases that state government officials make are not vetted by cybersecurity teams within the government, and security is considered an afterthought.
That’s one of the conclusions of a recently published guide from the National Association of State Chief Information Officers, which urges state officials to make cybersecurity an integral part of the acquisition process.
The guide, published in partnership with the National Association of State Procurement Officials and the Center for Internet Security — the nonprofit group behind the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center — says that procurement, IT and IT security teams need to work together to ensure IT acquisitions are secure.
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first published week of: 06/07/2021