“Responsibility for secure open software is, well, complicated,” writes Government Computer News. It’s not just complicated; it’s also perhaps one of the most misunderstood aspects of open source software development.

You’ve no doubt read that open source software (OSS) is more secure than proprietary software because the code is genuinely hardened thanks to reviewers in the open source community who have tested it, tried to break it, and then fixed the problems they uncover.

Proof of performance is a key criterion for any government decision maker when reviewing potential vendors and bidders. One such “proof” is recognition from industry analysts, and perhaps the most sought after of these is to be positioned (and ranked highly) in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant reports.

On February 11, Red Hat announced its newest release – Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.5 (RHEV for short).  This latest upgrade to Red Hat’s open source virtualization platform promises to deliver greater visibility into provisioning, configuring and monitoring of virtualization infrastructures and tighter integration with the OpenStack cloud infrastructure platform.

With all the noise and hubbub around insider threats and data hacks, it’s easy to ignore that other threats persist. Most notably, denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. DDoS occur when cyber criminals make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users.

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.