The GIST of Govt IT

Happy 250th birthday, America. In this special shortened Fourth of July episode of The GIST of Govt IT, Brian and Sean keep it snackable for the beach-and-boat crowd — kicking off with a debate over favorite founding fathers before turning to a rundown of the GIST 360 summer event lineup. Sean previews what's coming: a July 14 breakfast briefing at the National Press Club on securing the conv...

Four days. A spare $500 mini PC from Microcenter. An open-source quantized model running on 512 MB of VRAM. And by Thursday morning, an autonomous AI agent named Jenkins was finding vulnerabilities, chaining exploits, gaining root, and maintaining persistence — entirely on its own, with no human in the loop. In Episode 11 of The GIST of Govt IT, Brian and Sean are joined by Marlin McFate, Federal...

In Episode 10 of The GIST of Govt IT, Brian and Sean are joined by David Hutchins, Director of Naval Systems and Defense Technology at Forecast International, fresh off SOF Week in Tampa to discuss the pervasiveness of autonomous systems and platforms that is changing calculus of warfare. David, a Marine Corps veteran who enlisted at 17, walks through the moment autonomous warfare crossed the Rubi...

For years now, the question for federal agencies has been the same: is your data ready for AI? In Episode 9 of The GIST of Govt IT, Brian and Sean sit down with Andrew Churchill, who leads Qlik's Public Sector Business across the US and Canada, to dig into whether the answer is finally shifting from "not yet" to "we're getting there" — and what's actually driving...

48 hours. That's the time it took for a federal employee credentials to be stolen as a result of a phishing attack, to being listed on a dark web marketplace. In Episode 8 of The GIST of Govt IT, Brian and Sean sit down at Check Point's Engage Summit in DC with Yochai Corem, General Manager of Check Point's Exposure Management division, to unpack what happens when both sides of cybe...

When Iranian-linked cyber actors hit U.S. water, energy, and government facilities through internet-exposed Rockwell Allen-Bradley PLCs during the sixth week of the U.S.–Iran military campaign, they did it with attacks that were eightfold above baseline  and got within 30 to 40 minutes of opening dam gates. In Episode 7 of The GIST of Govt IT, Brian and Sean sit down with Matthew Shalbetter, Direc...

Last episode, we left you hanging with a question: when it comes to cybersecurity, what is the federal government doing to both leverage AI and defend against AI threats and most importantly, are we moving fast enough? In the conclusion of this two-part series, Sean takes us inside a White House industry day convened at the request of the Federal CISO Council. He breaks down the two themes of the...

Your router may not be your router. It could be a Russian surveillance device. In Episode 5 of The GIST of Govt IT, Brian and Sean unpack a stunning two weeks in cybersecurity: the FBI's court-authorized takedown of a Russian GRU operation that silently hijacked thousands of TP-Link routers across 23 American states, an Iranian-linked APT group actively disrupting U.S. water and energy system...

From a startup consulting shop to a $1.4B IBM acquisition, Octo Consulting Group's story is one of the great growth journeys in government IT. Brian and Sean sit down with Jay Shah, Octo's former COO, who helped guide the company through every inflection point — the pivot to DevSecOps and agile, the move from sub to prime, the strategic (and intentional non-) use of the 8(a) program, the...

"Chaos." "Change." "Opportunity." Three words that surfaced in a room full of federal contractors when asked to describe today's government IT environment. Sean and Brian unpack what's really driving the disruption, from RIFs and FAR overhauls to FedRAMP changes, the Anthropic supply chain risk designation, and the brain drain hitting agencies like NIST. The...

There's a workforce inside your agency that nobody hired, no one trained, and nobody is watching. We're talking about AI agents. In Episode 2 of The GIST of Govt IT, Brian and Sean sit down with Elad Schulman, CEO and co-founder of Lasso Security, to unpack what it actually takes to secure an agentic federal enterprise that seemed to arrive on the scene overnight. They dig into AI sprawl...

Sean and Brian kick off the inaugural episode of The GIST of Govt IT, and they're diving into why speed and real results are suddenly the only things that matter in federal IT, what's actually exciting in first response tech, and which consumer tech trends are about to hit the public sector harder than anyone expects. Then they turn to their big bets of 2026, where app modernization, AI,...