We are excited to announce the launch of Technically Speaking, DLT’s new podcast series dedicated to providing IT information to our public sector customers in an easy, listen-as-you-go format. TS will cover a variety of topics ranging from government IT initiatives to new products and solutions to any other topics that YOU would like to see discussed.

Despite the gnashing of teeth in 2009 when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, Sun's stewardship of Java seems to have passed, with very little turbulence, into capable hands. The language continues to evolve to address the productivity needs and desires of end users and mesh with the new computing models driven by the growth in web applications, mobile devices, and advances in hardware design and enterprise architectures.

As more companies and their employees look to cloud solutions, there is a corresponding uptick in anti-IT rants along the lines of the following: “Why do we need this archaic, lumbering, anti-progressive weight around the fast, nimble, amazingness that is our business? We can just go to FooCloud.com on our new, hot tablet and do everything we need to do without interference. That'll show those IT dinosaurs!” IT folks spend their entire working life ensuring that you don't know what it is we do for a living. Not because it is too complex and not because it is unimportant, but rather because if you do need us, then something is broken. We are often compared to electricians, plumbers and infrastructure maintenance. While those comparisons can be apt – we fix broken things you don't or can't fix – it misses a good amount of our responsibilities and doesn't account for any of the challenges we face. There also exist two major tribes of IT folks (Yes, I'm lumping all of the different specialties together): Operations and Enterprise. The differences between these two are subtle but important; it’s why I can't fix my mother's laptop, but I can design your brand new data center facility.

More and more government agencies are using Autodesk software to improve communication and collaboration between agencies, gain cost effectiveness and improve the productivity of design and manufacturing projects. Here’s our lowdown of the top five ways AutoCAD is being or can be deployed by agencies to improve workflow processes and reduce cost without sacrificing the quality of work.

After months of researching, writing, and editing, the DLT Cloud Advisory Group recently completed its new reference eBook, Cloud Computing for Govies™!

Do you have a chief cloud technologist? What about a cloud architecture engineer? If you missed it on Federal News Radio the first time, take a minute to listen to Federal Tech Talk with host John Gilroy as he interviews DLT Solutions chief cloud technologist, David Blankenhorn. David fields questions on cloud architecture and discusses topics including:

A couple of weeks ago we posted an interview DLT’s Chief Cloud Technologist David Blankenhorn did with fedScoop. The interview focused on open source software for government and included a question on how DLT supports it. To answer the question, David mentions our long time partnership with Red Hat.

When it comes to disaster recovery, there has historically been a limitation on disk storage. While tapes can easily be sent offsite to be used for restores after a site outage, disks do not offer the same flexibility. Some OpenStorage technologies, support out-of-band replication in which the contents of the disk storage are replicated between devices. In these instances, NetBackup has no knowledge of the data, which complicates recovery in a NetBackup protected environment because the replicated data can only be accessed after recreating the NetBackup catalog. Replication is done by importing the entire contents of the disk storage at the remote site using the bpimport command. The nbcatsync utility, introduced in NetBackup 6.5.6 and 7.0.1, can address this challenge as well, but it relies on being able to restore the catalog from a catalog backup and then post-processing it to reconcile the disk device mappings, resulting in a very time consuming process.

David Blankenhorn, DLT’s Chief Cloud Technologist, recently sat down with fedScoop TV to discuss the importance of open source software for government. In addition to providing an overview of the open source landscape, David includes recommendations for agencies exploring open source options.

An agency’s computer system is under constant cybersecurity threats from several factors. While many of them are intentional, such as fraud and theft, there are also the unintentional errors and omissions that threaten a systems security. Let’s take a closer look at some examples. The Intentionally Malicious Information technology is increasingly used to commit fraud and theft. Computer systems are exploited in numerous ways, both by automating traditional methods of fraud and by using new methods. Unfortunately, insiders who are authorized users of a system perpetrate the majority of the fraud uncovered on computer systems. Since insiders not only have access to, but are also familiar with the victim computer system (including what resources it controls and where the flaws are), authorized system users are in a better position to commit crimes. Former employees may also pose threats, particularly if their access is not terminated promptly.