This is Why 2018 Will Be the Year of Blockchain in Government

There’s been a lot of buzz about blockchain in 2017. It was only a few months ago in March 2017 that Betanews predicted that blockchain would be the buzzword that would take 2017 by storm. And it did, expanding beyond the financial community where it’s had a home for several years and breaking into other enterprise sectors.

But few foretold that blockchain would have such a hand in government digital transformation in 2017. In fact, the two go hand in hand.

What is Blockchain?

Why and How to Shed Light on Your Agency’s Dark Data

“Dark data” – by that we mean data that’s been stored away in some IT system and untouched for years, is about to come out of the shadows.

Thanks to big data technologies it’s become easier than ever to extract new business value from information assets that haven been collected, processed and stored away (either because they’d served their purpose or were required to be kept for compliance reasons).

Not using, analyzing, or even accessing that data not only inflates storage costs, it could also leave that data vulnerable to the mismanagement of sensitive data.

Open Source – A Game Changer for Government Application Modernization

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 Ways Procuring the Government Cloud is Different

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.

The 4 Biggest Government Cybersecurity Threats of 2014 (and How to Stop Them)

While we’ve been busy fretting about Ebola and the Islamic State, in 2014 cybersecurity trumped terrorism as the number one threat to the U.S.

Despite investing billions in cybersecurity, federal, state and local agencies are struggling to keep pace with ever-evolving threats.

Let’s take a look at the biggest cybersecurity threats of 2014 (so far) and steps the federal as well as state and local government can take to stop them.

The Government Workforce