Federal Tech Podcast: for innovators, entrepreneurs, and CEOs who want to increase reach and improve brand awareness

Today's interview with Mike Wiegland from Shift5 highlights how commercial technology can assist warfighters on the battlefield.   Mike provides insight into how the commercial industry can help innovate with defense technology. He has a military and technical background and has real-world examples of how operational technology can enable military systems to deter adversaries. The federal governme...

In the early days of the Internet, companies would design databases that could handle what they perceived as tremendous amounts of information.   Memory was expensive, so those databases were optimized to handle related pieces of information, or relational databases. They relied on a system that used structured data language to pull up information. It got to the point where two or three companies...

Leaders at NASA know the value of simulation.   Before the Rover was sent to Mars, designers ran it though many scenarios on earth. Of course, they couldn't reproduce the climactic conditions on the Red Planet, but they knew they had to try to simulate the environment before it left for a 103.3-million-mile journey. Their pioneer work probably was developed out of training simulations for pilots....

Many phrases are bandied about that give the impression that they will solve the world's problems. You know them as well as I do:   artificial intelligence, machine learning, and even Robotic Process Automation. This is an interview with Brian Baney from Aeyon. He has worked with many varying applications of RPA to solve federal problems and can give an objective perspective. During the interview,...

Big problems need big solutions. Let us take a look at the Veteran's Benefits Administration as an example. It has been reported that the VBA completed a record 1.7 million total claims in fiscal 2022 . It disburses about $100 billion in benefits. That would certainly qualify as a major problem for any workflow scenario. No management course in the world would teach that anyone can manually handle...

Today's interview focuses on how the commercial success of Zscaler and its hundreds of patents can help large military organizations reduce costs and increase security of a cloud transition. A good way to understand the challenges that the U.S. Army facing was by some of the comments that   Ray Iyer, the Army's Chief Information Officer, made during his recent exit interview. When he started his p...

Reliaquest is a very successful commercial company, and it has a set of skills that can be directly applied to the federal government. Today's interview is with Michael McPherson.   He worked for the FBI for over 25 years, and he chose to work for Reliaquest because he believes its technology matrix offers the best hope for securing all networks, that included federal. During the interview, he exp...

Federal technology leaders are pushed and pulled from many directions.   On the one hand, they are expected to produce solutions that respond instantly; on the other hand, they have restricted budgets, unlimited amounts of unstructured data being transferred all the time, and concern about efficiency. This is an interview with Zach Duncan from Pure Storage, he provides some solutions to these vexi...

When you hire a moving company, they send out a representative and they do a survey of what is in your house and give you an estimate.   A much more difficult scenario is when a federal technology leader tries to get a handle on what they have in their domain and how to maintain it. To continue the house analogy, if you have a piano it just sits there.   In the tech world, virtual assets are const...

When the concept of Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) was first developed, nobody envisioned the roller coaster ride it would take since its inception with Executive Order 13556 in 2010 with its emphasis on Controlled Unclassified Information.   The goal was to assess and enhance the cybersecurity posture of contractors who serve the DoD.   The target framework was a document from...

Akamai has been around the security community for so long that they almost deserve the term, "venerable."  They first made a big splash on September 11, 2001. That was the day The Washington Post was overwhelmed by traffic.  Some quick work from Akamai helped newspapers and organizations keep up to speed. In its early years, Akamai was known as a Content Delivery Network that helped websites adjus...

Federal leaders will attest to the statement, "Security must be top of mind throughout an application's development."  Today, we sat down with Jeff Gallimore, Chief Technology, and Innovation Officer at Excella to try to see how this noble concept can be applied to the amazingly complex and ever-changing world of federal technology. During the interview, Jeff highlights the areas of continuous imp...

Technology changes so rapidly that, sometimes, people who are involved in federal technology may not realize how well-known companies are innovating to respond to the new threat landscape. F5 is well known to the federal community; they started in the mid-1990s beginning with application delivery controllers.  Even at its inception, the founders of F5 demonstrated an advanced understanding of traf...

When Vivek Kundra called for a cloud-first emphasis back in 2011 , he never thought that it would be so popular that a situation would arise where data centers may be in short supply. Everybody knows 70% of the world's Internet traffic goes through Ashburn Virginia. In spite of massive numbers of data centers and constant construction or more, most do not know there is a 1% vacancy rate. Every dat...

Years ago, one would enter a federal agency with a badge and go to work.  The server was down the hall and much of the security was based on the classic Personal Identity Verification (PIV) card. The past five years has seen that model turned upside down.  During COVID, 80% of federal employees started to work remotely.  The move to the cloud has accelerated the need for a more flexible, yet autho...

All systems, including federal systems, are full of vulnerabilities. The question is, given a limited number of hours in the day and a limited staff, how can you optimize your resources to remedy this issue? Well, the Cybersecurity & Cyberinfrastructure Security Agency has released a Binding Operative Directive that targets that concern. It was released on November 10, 2023, and is titled, "Transf...

It is all about alignment. When you hit a pothole, you need to get your car aligned; if you do not your tires will wear out and can cause an expensive repair to the bushings and ball joints of your car. Anybody who has worked on a federal technology project knows the world of digital potholes. Only in this case, the project halts because your agency's data is not aligned with the agency's goals. D...

Once upon a time scientists would dream of the day when they could have enough information to make decisions based on data.  Young readers may have to go to history books to see computer science majors take stacks of punch cards to a computer room so they can get an answer in the morning. Fast forward to 2022, we have so much data we don't know how to handle it.  The overview is simple – gather up...

When it comes to a federal agency making the transition to Zero Trust, sometimes, ya gotta bring in the big dog. Greg Garret has written 24 business books and has decades of experience helping federal agencies solve complex problems.  Seems to me he might be able to give a good perspective on understanding the federal government's transition to zero trust better than most. During the interview, Gr...

If you were to do a "thought cloud" of technology, you would see the usual suspects, companies like Microsoft, AWS, and Google. Nobody would include Elastic Search in this discussion, yet it is seen all over the place, perhaps the best kept secret in federal technology. Because it is capable of being modified in so many ways, it is difficult to categorize it. Elastic is a flexible tool that allows...

There was a time in American culture when "living on the edge" was a social construct. Perhaps a person was a test pilot or motorcycle racer.  In terms of federal information technology, we all live on the edge. The edge referred to is, of course, the digital edge.  The wall protecting federal data has long been breached and technologies like Zero Trust are being implemented to protect vital asset...

It is not just lemmings that follow a herd off the cliff; technology professionals are garden-variety humans and subject to herd thinking as well. If you try to keep up with trade publications you are subject to the editorial selection process of the folks who run the periodicals, newspapers, blog sites, newsletters, and podcasts.  Catchy phrases pop up and it puts some joy into the drudgery of a...

In today's interview, Darin Curtis from Menlo Security gives an overview of how to protect against these kinds of threats. To describe this new category, he uses a curious acronym HEAT, Highly Evasive Adaptive Threats. Malicious actors leave no stone unturned in creative ways to attack federal technology. We all know that the perimeter has been breached and we must rely on Zero Trust Architecture....

Ten years ago, it was a major accomplishment to move an application from a federal on-premises server to the cloud. Fast forward to 2022. There is so much data flooding into a wide variety of clouds used by the federal government that the term "terabyte" is tossed around like a stickie note. Updated terms are being generated to make sense of the large data stores: phrases like "data lakes" and "da...

Attacks on the software supply chain have grown by an average of 742% a year since 2019. It makes complete sense if you look at several factors. Years ago, a software developer would write code as part of a large project. It is quite possible they had the opportunity to examine all aspects of their code for vulnerabilities. That transitioned to developers grabbing blocks of code from libraries. Ev...