For 28 years, the GCN Awards have showcased general excellence in government IT. This year, with the GCN dig IT Awards, we are sharpening the focus to showcase what matters most: transformative tech that is truly reinventing government. The 2016 awards will celebrate leading—edge technologies and the pioneering IT professionals who are driving them forward. Join us this year at the GCN dig IT Awards — October 13, 2016 at The Ritz-C...

In October 2015, the Office of Management and Budget released its much-anticipated Cybersecurity Implementation Plan (CSIP), a multi-pronged initiative aimed at getting agencies up to speed on cybersecurity. The strategy reflects the dual realities of the cybersecurity challenge: The increasingly diverse and sophisticated nature of today’s cyber threats, and the increasingly complex nature of the federal enterprise to be protected. A str...

Federal agencies have only begun to explore the benefits of the cloud. Without a doubt, five years into the federal government’s “Cloud First” policy, cloud is delivering important results—most notably the ability to quickly deploy IT resources and scale up operations as requirements change. But in most agencies, the greater potential for transformation remains largely untapped. With the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Ac...

For close to a decade the Obama administration has been putting together the components of a system to automate the identification and response to security breaches in government agencies. The move toward security and monitoring as-a-service is based on a consensus that fixed network defense technologies have not lived up to their promise to protect federal networks. Tools are now emerging to identify and block critical threats to agency syste...

Event Postponed For the Defense Department, the future is about convergence—bringing the military services and coalition partners together on the same networking and communications platform, analyzing and layering data from multiple sources and making it accessible via the cloud, and seamlessly integrating cyber and kinetic operations. Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s public/private innovation initiative also promotes collaboration a...

Federal IT leaders know the benefits cloud computing can provide, from enabling innovation and faster deployment of application to more available, reliable, scalable and flexible operations. Yet despite understanding these benefits and federal mandates that strongly urge the use of cloud computing whenever possible, many agencies aren’t nearly as invested in the cloud as they want to be. Indeed, according to an annual survey of senior fe...

Register for the Washington Technology Department of Commerce Industry Day event where we'll hear from top decision makers from various Commerce Department bureaus and subagencies, who will share information on their mission, their organizations and their particular IT priorities. This event will explore the following topics: Insight into technology and IT acquisition needs Overview of small business programs and what current business environm...

Federal agencies have gotten the message loud and clear: They need to raise the bar on the quality of digital services offered to the public. Citizens are used to the innovative and engaging services found in retail, banking, and social media. When they turn to government websites, they expect more of the same. According to a survey from Accenture Public Services, nearly half of citizens today handle most of their government interactions digit...

A number of high-profile data breaches in 2015 have made cybersecurity a top priority in the federal government. But the cyber threat has been growing steadily in recent years, even as agencies have stepped up their efforts to combat it through new and better technologies, policies, and management strategies. For example, according to the latest FISMA Compliance Report from the Office of Management and Budget, federal agencies reported more th...

The federal IT enterprise is changing. Under pressure to improve the agility and scalability of IT services, federal agencies are looking to take a new approach to their enterprise infrastructure. They need the ability to rapidly provision resources—compute, storage, networking, software—to meet constantly shifting workload demands driven by cloud, mobility, big data, and related solutions. The traditional approach of dedicating re...