With more and more software and services being offloaded to the cloud and the surge in big government data, the speed of your storage still matters – very much.

Driven by potentially compelling outcomes, big government data is growing. A 2013 study of federal IT officials by the TechAmerica Foundation, for example, found that big data delivers many benefits, including:

Cloud is a big investment, and the pace of adoption over the past few years has reflected this with agencies albeit tip toeing towards cloud. In the past 12 months, however, the cloud is on the move, with IDC Government Insights predicting that a 25% growth in the sourcing of government clouds will drive cross-governmental initiatives by 2018.

Central IT within academic institutions has many customers – students, researchers, administrative bodies and more. So when a large public university noticed a service offering gap for campus customers needing environments to develop and host university-related web applications, they knew that a traditional solution – that of deploying virtual machines with operating systems and software stacks managed by the customer – was an unsustainable solution.

According to Federal Computer Week, federal agencies spend almost half of their annual IT budgets on supporting legacy applications. Even more worrying, about 47% of the government’s existing IT applications are based on legacy technology that needs modernizing.

While digital government innovation is on the rise, as evidenced by websites like Healthcare.gov and numerous state and local intra-agency and citizen-centric services, the underlying IT systems required to support these innovations – the middleware – is struggling to keep up.

5 Things Every Agency Should Know About Procuring Cloud Services

If your agency is making the move to cloud services, it can expect cost-savings, improved service delivery, and all the great things that the cloud brings. But for procurement and purchasing officials whose practices and contracting vehicles were designed to help managers provision hardware and software, not on-demand services like the cloud, it can all cause a bit of a frenzy.

It’s that time of year again, winter is upon us and public works and transportation agencies are looking at ways to keep a close tab on salt supplies.

Shortages are a common occurrence.Unexpected storms and unpredictable snowfall amounts can wreak havoc with salt supplies.

While most municipalities in snowier climes tend to store enough salt for three storms, determining actual volume isn’t easy. It’s likely that DoT officials know this value prior to the first storm, but what about after that?

The saying “new year, new you” typically refers to the resolutions that people make around this time of year – but did you know it can also apply to the approach you can take in honing your 2015 IT skills?

Data breaches are an unfortunate fact of life for government agencies – Edward Snowden being the most infamous case. And although agencies have taken steps to protect themselves, the growing number of breaches continues to frustrate IT and legislators alike.

Big data is a big bet for the public sector.

It’s estimated that U.S. federal agencies currently store 1.61 petabytes of data – and it’s expected to do a lot more with that data than it currently is. In a 2012 survey by the 1105 Government Information Group, 63% of the almost 200 respondents agreed that unless they implement and use big data it will be more difficult to meet their agency's mission

What is Big Data?