This week DLT Solutions announced the formation of the Cloud Advisory Group (CAG). This specialty-based knowledge practice is designed specifically to help our customers understand what cloud technologies are available and how best to leverage that technology. Cloud Computing is a hot topic today, and as such, there’s no shortage of people who are putting their own spin on it. Fortunately, the folks over at the National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) have done a good job of providing the baseline by crafting a definition of cloud computing as well as version 1.0 of a cloud Reference Architecture. Fortunately, it looks like most of the journalists and consultants have adopted this definition, and this makes it easier for all of us to start the conversation.

The Federal CIO office recently published this video to help explain cloud computing from a government perspective:

It is interesting that there is no equivalent term in Latin for risk outside of the word for danger. While security is the state of being free from danger or threat, risk, is a more complex topic and cannot be addressed without the concept of loss. It is the probability, not merely the possibility of something unpleasant or unwelcome happening that will result in a loss of some kind (life, liberty, property). The term did not even come into existence until the 17th century after the Medici had leveraged eastern mathematics in the calculation of probability in financial terms and still the word risk is derived from the word danger. Big mistake!

What the heck is SORT you ask? Well, it’s Symantec’s new “make your life easier” tool. SORT (Symantec Operations Readiness Tools) is a set of Web-based tools that supports Symantec enterprise products. It automates and simplifies some of the most time-consuming administrator tasks! These tools basically make it easy to prepare for your next installation or upgrade.

Cindy Cassill is the director of systems integration in the office of the CIO for the US Department of State. Prior to her current position at the Department of State, Cindy has over 30 years of federal IT experience. She was the CIO at the FAA Regions & Centers. She also was the CIO at the US Army Test and Evaluation Command and was the director of IT at the deputy assistant secretary of the army for civilian personnel. This article highlights portions of Cindy Cassill’s presentation and the steps the agency took for their consolidation. Click Here to download the entire presentation and transcript at length.

Enterprise virtualization solutions offer a valuable way to reduce operating expenses by removing underutilized servers from data centers. New servers designed around virtualization workloads instead of traditional single application workloads are offered by many manufacturers. Hardware extensions to CPUs and PCI buses allow hypervisors to directly and efficiently present resources to virtual machines to reduce the performance penalty imposed by an additional layer between the application and system resources. Storage vendors offer adaptable configurations and integration with enterprise virtualization solutions. High speed and high bandwidth network interconnects deliver the necessary throughput to service the consolidated network traffic requirements.

“Good security doesn’t stop with just an anti-virus client and a perimeter firewall.” Government Security News (GSN) recently published an article written by DLT Engineer, Aaron Payne, about bringing “Security back to the basics: Managing the threat” that addresses the concern that there are many layers necessary to keeping enterprise IT systems secure.

Hi, everyone. Join me at the Autodesk Virtual Event on April 20th where I will be showing everyone the new features inside of AutoCAD 2012. My session, Explore the World of AutoCAD 2012, is at 9:00 AM PDT and I will be showing some of my favorite features like Model Documentation, 2D and 3D Associative Arrays and Overkill – yes, now it’s a real live command! Those are just a few of my favorites.

(This is Part 2 of Matt’s series. To read part one, click here.) If SOA is intended to build a distributed application environment whose data sources are far from the end user with processing somewhere in between, then the next logical step is extending that processing onto a cloud resource. In fact, the Ocean Observatory Initiative is already leveraging current commercial cloud providers within their distributed framework. SOA and MOM (message oriented middleware) are two of the key paradigms used in the design of the OOI Cyber Infrastructure. While this architecture incorporates cloud resources as a component of the overall distributed application, similar approaches can be used to migrate resources from local systems to a cloud provider.

By Jennifer Jackson Last month I attended Quantum’s First Annual Tech Summit in Englewood, Colorado Not only was the weather a gorgeous 70 degrees for the conference, but Quantum provided an equally great platform for System Engineers around the globe to make suggestions, learn from each other, and become familiar with the directions Quantum is taking.