Technically Speaking

For the past few years, the word “open” has been a cornerstone of government IT. Not open in terms of security, of course—that would never do—but open in relation to technology that allows for greater agility and flexibility, as outlined in the Federal Source Code Policy.

Compromised credentials are a leading cause of security breaches.  According to Verizon’s 2015 Data Breach Investigations Report, 95% of security incidents involved stealing credentials from customer devices, and using them to web applications.  So many stolen credentials are available to hackers, generally on the Dark Web, that passwords are no longer effective.

As you may know Autodesk Industry Collections became available to government agencies as of February 1. This date also coincided with the retirement of perpetual licenses for most of its products, including AutoCAD, Civil 3D, Inventor, Revit, and more. But what’s so great about these new collections and how do they differ from the old Autodesk Suites? First let’s explain what a collection is.

It always blows my mind when I talk to designers and engineers who are still using CAD, even Microsoft Visio, for engineering and design work. But when it comes to designing future transportation systems, where complex workflows, tight budgets, and multiple stakeholders complicate project success, CAD simply doesn’t cut it anymore. Why? Drew Olsen, writing for the BIM on the Rocks blogs, shares some reasons: You need a faster way to get in front of the stakeholder to advance reviews

Although still in its infancy in the public sector, making the shift to DevOps methodologies is starting to catch on with many government agencies, including the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the EPA, and Nuclear Regulatory Commission. As you may know, with DevOps, IT tasks and application deployment that would normally take months or years, now take weeks. But Rome wasn’t built in a day.

CAD files are highly valued and frequently shared and exchanged. But CAD files often contain confidential information and IP which can have legal data protection obligations. To protect these files collaborators may use email encryption programs, network file share access control, secure file transfer protocol, mobile device management, enterprise and cloud-based content management, and so on.