Breaking Blockchain Free of Cryptocurrency

Blockchain may be best known for its role in enabling cryptocurrency to be tracked. While the use of cryptocurrency is still in its infancy, blockchain technology is proving to be applicable in a number of non-currency use cases.

Improving Public Transportation

The Federal Transit Administration is looking for ways to use blockchain as a way of "gamifying" decisions around transportation options. A proposed project, "blockchain-enabled transit incentivization," would, via an app, offer tokens to commuters who reserve a parking place or agree to use another mode of transportation. Using real time data about availability of parking, traffic congestion, and more, the app could change the incentives offered - making public transport a more appealing (and lucrative) option for people in transit. Blockchain could support the payment of those who chose incentivized public transit options as well as those who are using parking. The system could also promote equity in access to parking or other resources by factoring in a user's location or personal circumstances. Continue reading

A New AWS Snowball Edge Provides The Power Of The Cloud In Disconnected Environments

From time to time GovEvents will come across information we feel our members and audience would benefit from. Here's something we wanted to share from Bob Gourley, Founder and CTO at Crucial Point LLC:

 

For the last decade enterprise architects have all known the importance of engineering continuous connectivity to cloud services. If you want to use the cloud you have to have a path to it.

For parts of the enterprise who may operate at the edge, where connectivity can be an issue, it has been hard to design solutions leveraging public clouds. Depending on the organization, edge users might have some mix of public cloud, private cloud, datacenter access and local compute, all complex and hardly optimized at all. Continue reading

Getting (Vendor) Certified

We've written before about the importance of certifications for expanding your knowledge base and helping you stand out among competition when looking for new career opportunities. As we highlighted in that post, industry certifications show mastery of a certain skill area from security to project management to database administration. Today we want to highlight the power of vendor-specific certifications for your career.[Tweet "Getting Vendor Certified -- The power of vendor-specific certifications for your career. #GovEventsBlog"]

Much like we wrote about the value of vendor-led events, there is a tangible benefit in being certified in specific technologies as there's no escaping the major technology vendors. Their technology is in place across the government and oftentimes is providing the platform on which entire IT infrastructures are designed. Doing a deep dive and getting certified in a technology that is critical to your agency makes you a key resource for ensuring that the systems that rely on that vendor keep running and evolving.

Based on what we see in the market, here are some recommendations of vendor certifications that can add to your knowledge-base as well as your value to current and future employers.[Tweet "Recommendations of vendor certifications that can add to your knowledge-base. #GovEventsBlog"] Continue reading