Affiliate Programs and Affiliate Reviews
Cloud technology is supposed to greatly increase the efficiency and productivity of electronic information systems. For federal agencies, though, cloud migration has been a bit of a "catch-22" proposition. All the intense preparation work for migrating to the cloud — including efforts to resolve important data security issues — consumes scarce time and resources.
A special congressional panel is facing a deadline of Nov. 23 to propose more than a trillion dollars in federal budget reductions over 10 years. If the panel fails, an automatic budget-cutting mechanism will take effect. Either way, the U.S. government will be launching a major austerity program that will affect virtually all agencies — and all government contractors.
Children often focus on neighborhood role models as their first glimpse of what they want to be when they grow up. School nurse, perhaps. Or firefighter. Or police officer. In a future increasingly consumed by information technology, who will be the first responders to provide first aid for a computer scrape, douse a virtual IT fire, or catch a cybercriminal?
The big number always seems to be there. The big number is the amount of money the U.S. federal government invests in information technology. In constant dollars, that number has hovered slightly above or slightly below $80 billion per year since 2007, according to TechAmerica. That funding level is an inviting target for vendors and is frequently cited as the size of the federal IT market.
The U.S. government’s plan to shift major chunks of existing and future information technology programs to cloud-based systems has proven to be easy to say but harder to do. Technical, cultural and financial issues are frequently raised by agency managers as barriers to adopting cloud technology. Various initiatives have been launched to encourage cloud adoption at the federal level.