Technically Speaking

The concept of cloud computing has been around for many years now. Anyone positioned in the information technology (IT) world knows the language: SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, multi-cloud, hybrid, on-prem, and the list goes on. How has the concept of cloud morphed? More importantly, what are the cloud buzzwords and concepts that you should be aware of to get in front of end-users? Edge computing, data-centric architecture and sky computing are emerging, and here to stay. Let’s break down what each is and its current or future role in the U.S. federal market.

President Joe Biden signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2022 (FY22) into law on December 27, 2021. It authorizes $770 billion in defense spending which is a 5% increase over last year. This marks 61 consecutive years that a bill received bipartisan support from congress (a display of agreement that has become increasingly rare for DC politics).

Customer experience is now an executive order in the United States! With this monumental news, Lee Becker dives deeper into what this means for federal employees and their customers. This was a momentous and inspiring week for all U.S. citizens and residents, as President Joe Biden signed an executive order on December 13, 2021, that mandates a focus on customer experience.

Transition periods are never easy. As businesses move from routine practices to uncertain situations, there’s a level of trepidation involved. Thankfully, there are ways to ease this anxiety—namely, by shedding light on the gap in old vs. new practices. At a time when many organizations are either in the middle of transition or running up against it, investment in visibility is imperative. Nowhere is visibility more important than facility planning. Facility managers need oversight as they begin to adapt assets and workflows in the near-term and for the future.

With another busy year behind us, it’s time to look ahead to fiscal year (FY) 2022. The official information technology (IT) budget request is $97B, a 4% increase over FY21, which would be a new record. Of course, those numbers undercount all the IT spending that goes unreported. Furthermore, remaining provisions in the American Rescue Plan, the Technology Modernization Fund and IT provisions in the Infrastructure Bill will represent additional pockets of opportunity worth billions for channel partners and technology vendors.

There are a variety of excellent reasons to use containers. They're more agile and consume fewer resources than virtual machines. They provide more flexibility and security than running applications directly on the OS. They are easy to orchestrate at massive scale using platforms like Kubernetes.