Government IT News For VARs — November 12, 2013
This week, the U.S. Navy’s Data Center Consolidation Project is looking for a solution to move data to commercial facilities, government agencies need to consider protecting Big Data from hackers, and Apple releases a statement about government requests for data.
Navy Moving Data To Commercial Facilities
The Space and Naval Warfare System Command announced the November 20, 2013 “Navy Data Center Consolidation Way-Ahead Industry Day” to discuss details of the U.S. Navy’s plans to move its data to commercial facilities. The invitation to industry representatives says the Data Center Consolidation (DCC) project “seeks the lowest cost solution that meets DCC and technical security requirements for hosting in both non-government and government environments.” The announcement states that consolidating data centers increases efficiency and cost savings, and virtualization enables the Navy to optimize space and increase computing power.
Hackers Could Target Big Data
According to Georgia Tech researchers, agencies will face the problem of Big Data manipulation. A Nextgov article says researchers speculated that “an attacker could program fake malicious operations to exhaust the energy of security analysts or slowly create a wide variance in some metrics to make it look like odd network behavior is normal.”
Apple Releases Details Of Government Requests For Data
Apple has released the details of government requests for its data. Apple says most requests involve criminal investigations and total between 1,000 and 2,000 requests from January to June of this year.
Federal Government Will Face Growing Volumes Of Data
The panel at the annual American Council for Technology — Industry Advisory Council Executive Leadership Conference gave some perspective to Big Data related to the federal government. According to an Information Week article, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), for example, now relies on supercomputers that process 2 million billion calculations per second to produce weather and related reports. That administration’s data is growing 30 petabytes per year. In addition to dealing with the volume of data, deciding the best uses for the data is another challenge government agencies face.
Government IT Talking Points
An FCW article points out that the Department of Homeland Security relies on Big Data more than any physical barrier at U.S borders. Data — collected when people or maritime and air-freight containers move across borders — is combined with other databases to help identify risks to specific passengers or cargo.
A Military & Aerospace Electronics blog article points out that U.S. defense contractors could face yet another challenge. After the government shutdown and with decreasing defense budgets, it’s also possible that governments around the world might be discounting U.S.-developed information security and encryption. The article says, the rumor is, other countries are looking elsewhere “out of fear that the NSA may be building back doors into these systems to enhance NSA global intelligence gathering capabilities.”
Workforce Opportunity Service (WOS) announced this week that Hewlett Packard, Automatic Data Processing (ADP), United Rentals, and Covanta Energy have hired veterans for IT jobs or as consultants. WOS has worked with companies for the past three years to train and place veterans in these positions.