FedScoop Radio

Federal, state and local governments are still adapting to the consequences of COVID-19. But what many of them have discovered is that in the face of growing citizen demands, shifting administration priorities and budget uncertainties, it’s still possible to adopt new technologies relatively quickly to deliver digital services. For Andrew Fairbanks, who leads a public sector team of more than 3,00...

Artificial intelligence tools are increasingly being used by government agencies to meet their mission needs. This last year in particular, the need to help people remotely and respond to the public health crisis pushed many federal and state agency leaders to evaluate and implement AI tools. Technology evangelist Alexis Bonnell worked alongside several agencies to imagine the “art of the possible...

U.S. Customs and Border Protection director Ed Mays and Dell Technologies’ John Garrett discuss what’s driving the need for increased edge computing resources. They discuss the increase of users and devices on federal networks, in addition to the surge in data generation. That is driving a need for higher performing computing capabilities at the edge of their networks. “As we get more and more of...

Throughout the public health crisis, cloud and artificial intelligence-enabled tools have been a great help to advancing research, collaboration and mission activities. Particularly encouraging is the way that public health leaders are able to share biological information across the globe, says Google Cloud’s Dr. Alexander Titus. “I think that collaboration across science has always been pretty st...

The volume and velocity of data generated by government continues to grow at astronomic rates. At the same time, federal agencies have a lot of legacy applications that need to be re-factored to take advantage of modern architectures While government organizations continue to look for more effective ways to handle high-volume data management and analysis strategies, they can benefit from taking ad...

The pandemic was a forcing agent causing agencies to rethink identity and how users access government resources and placed a greater emphasis on cloud-based services. As a result, IT leaders are looking more holistically at how they manage identity across the enterprise network while still complying with federal identity, credential and access management (FICAM) rules. Andrew Whelchel and Dmitry K...

Government agencies have been trying to reduce their reliance on paper for decades. While Congress moved to speed up this process when it passed the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act in 2018, agencies are still processing millions of paper forms a year. One of the many challenges agencies continue to face is that these processes also require new infrastructure, website updates and dig...

Having a data strategy is not a "nice-to-have" anymore, rather it’s a "must-have" for federal agencies, according to Aileen Black. Agencies are making progress in incorporating principles and practices from the Federal Data Strategy, but many still struggle to provide trust in, and secure access to, government data. “I have the opportunity see governments around the world. And the U.S. federal gov...

As the federal government transitions to a new administration, and new priorities, one initiative that’s expected to remain on track is the Federal Data Strategy — a set of principles, practices and action steps to make more productive use of federal data. But where and how agencies move forward with their data strategies — and whether they get the IT funding they need — will play an important par...

Data management platforms not only play a part in driving digital transformation in the public sector, but also represent a key factor in attracting talent into public service. Brian Chidester says the future of government work is playing out across three different theaters: work, workforce and the workplace. Each one of them are key to improving the of delivery of government services. Chidester s...

Bonus Podcast: IC's Nancy Morgan at the Data Cloud Summit by FedScoop

Cloud computing has given federal agencies newfound ability to run large-scale modeling and high-performance computing workloads that not that long ago required coveted time slots on supercomputers. But moving the massive data sets from agency data centers to the cloud still involves a lot of work. Data extraction charges can also be costly and until recently, latency was a significant issue. That...

The pandemic fundamentally changed the way agencies approach user access to systems and data. With telework, IT departments had to confront weakness in identity management that weren’t designed for large numbers of unmanaged devices connecting from offsite networks. The shift in security drew a distinction between authenticator tools and authentication controls, says Duo Security’s Bryan Rosenstee...

Federal datasets are growing exponentially, and as they do, agencies are rising to the occasion to better understand, manage, analyze, visualize and share their data through improved strategy and increased leadership. With a host of data on hand, agencies have been placing a new emphasis on the importance of that data and what they can do with it, says Red Hat's David Egts, in a new podcast. He is...

During the pandemic, the security threats facing federal agencies have significantly expanded. While the number of agency endpoints grow and federal employees work remotely with limited VPNs and legacy equipment, hackers are not relenting. To account for this new cloud-based paradigm where the network is no longer confined to the physical walls of a federal building, agencies must now pivot to a z...

Government agencies are discovering managed security services represent an increasingly attractive alternative to trying to find and retain the cybersecurity skills they need to defend against a growing array of threats. That’s due in part to the need for newer, deeper and broader security skills than most agencies have on staff and managed services providers have the ability to access the depth a...

The remote workforce has opened up the floodgates on cyber risk, presenting new challenges to operate safely in distributed environments. In addition to staying on top of growing threats, government CTOs and CISOs are also required to keep their environments current on an extensive list of federal compliance and regulatory guidance. Microsoft’s Alym Rayani explains how IT leaders will benefit from...

The extensive ecosystem of open source partners and applications can be a boon to federal agencies trying to boost their modernization efforts. IT leader Christine Cox says that agencies which work with the global open source development community are able to accelerate service delivery and overcome many of the common barriers to cloud modernization. Developing applications using open source tools...

The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted the federal government’s workforce to cloud-based telework and agency leaders need to address security concerns around access to sensitive information. Even before COVID-19, the risk associated with securing federal IT systems and their underlying data remained high after a variety of high-profile attacks, such as the 2016 breach at the Office of Personnel Managem...

Agencies that are implementing the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program have an opportunity to use their CDM data to increase the value of cyberdefense and cyber-operations programs. There's a wealth of sensor data for CDM reporting that has an untapped value. Operationalizing it lets CDM become more than a compliance program, says Splunk's Frank Dimina. Fusing CDM data with other informa...

Defense Department agencies and their mission partners that are looking to work on projects in a DOD-authorized cloud environment can do so almost immediately — and at significantly lower costs — by using a program called milCloud 2.0, says an executive leading the program. The milCloud 2.0 program, which is supported by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and GDIT, is designed specifica...

The shift to remote work during the pandemic has given ransomware attackers a wider foothold to exploit IT vulnerabilities, forcing federal IT leaders to build new trust mechanisms and develop stronger safeguards to secure their data, say security experts in a new FedScoop podcast. The sudden increase in personal computing devices connecting to agency networks — and the ability to compromise the h...

Social safety nets have proven to be especially vital during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. But in some cases, the underlying legacy IT infrastructure supporting the modern delivery of those services has failed them. Artificial intelligence and machine learning, however, have played an increasingly important role in helping agencies adapt to the challenges of the pandemic — particularly with vo...

Federal agencies are finding more ways to adopt robotic process automation (RPA) tools to meet the needs of citizens and to help their employees use their time more productively. Agency leaders from Customs and Border Protection and Department of Labor discuss how they are offloading mundane business tasks so federal workers can focus on more valuable work. “Most adoption of RPA starts in back-off...

As federal agencies have worked to engage more with citizens in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, they’ve looked to artificial intelligence to help with the spike in people seeking information and services. Agencies saw a major uptick in citizens just wanting more information on how the virus is spread, its symptoms and how many people had contracted it. As measures kicked in to stop the spread o...