When head of Rotherham Council ICT Richard Copley recently called for a Local Government Digital Service, I immediately thought “that’s an ambitious idea and welcome thinking”.
We should always be open to bold new approaches that challenge the status quo and are driven by a genuine desire to deliver a better and more cost effective service for the public. After all, the central Government Digital Service (GDS) was such an idea and look how award-winningly successful that has been.
However, I’m also mindful of Mike Bracken’s comment at a 2013 SOCITM conference that «it was the devil’s own job to get 24 departments to agree to adopt Gov.uk». As Richard Copley himself admits, it would be a serious challenge to scale that task up to 326 councils/local authorities and their digital departments spread right across the country.
Worldwide IT spending is projected to rise US$3.8 trillion in 2014 according to recent Gartner research, a 3.1 percent increase from spending in 2013, which was $3.7 trillion. While not a huge jump in dollars, it does indicate that companies have been conserving cash over the past few years and are ready and willing to invest – albeit conservatively – with the recovery in place.
The promise of the Cloud has been validated and tested now over several years and organizations are increasing budgets and plans accordingly, more liberal spending is being seen by Cloud service providers who are witnessing an uptick in demand from businesses that are planning to address outdated infrastructure in 2014. Even organizations that are wary of significant cash outlays are recognizing the long-term IT savings it represents and are willing to take the steps to integrate solutions that eliminate CAPEX, and future-proof their infrastructure while providing predictable cash flow.
Coraid’s modular, scale-out approach has helped service providers as well as enterprises have a better methodology to deploy storage for cloud architectures. The company’s Ethernet storage technology has a well-documented track record in large-scale cloud architectures, providing a lower TCO.
Coraid has spent the last year focused on expanding the experience level of its leadership team to include Dave Kresse as CEO, Stewart Grierson as CFO, Keith Carpenter as vice president of worldwide sales, and Gail Boddy as vice president of human resources. The company also secured access to $29.3 million in additional financing in December of 2013.
Instead of abstracting individual, static Service interfaces, Business Services must abstract sets of such interfaces via content-based routing and transformation operations on an intermediary like an ESB. Implement those abstraction operations as a matter of policy, and you shift control of the behavior of your SOA deployment to the metadata-driven policy layer. Get all this right and you have enormous control and flexibility over your legacy environment. The problem is, of course, that it’s extraordinarily difficult to get all these moving parts right.
Rob Wigley is Director, Cybersecurity Consulting Services at HP Enterprise Services, U.S. Public Sector. He has more than 30 years of information technology experience supporting manufacturing, high tech, healthcare, and public sector market segments. For the last 10 years, he has focused on developing and delivering cybersecurity consulting solutions for public sector clients.
SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Thank you for joining us today, Rob. Can you please tell us a little about your background and your role within HP.
Rob Wigley: I have more than 30 years of information technology experience supporting manufacturing, high tech, healthcare, and public sector market segments. For the last 10 years, as regulatory requirements for information security have increased in association with mounting threats facing government and businesses today, I have focused on developing and delivering cybersecurity consulting solutions for public sector clients. This market has unique IT security requirements and is facing a significant increase of cyber threats. HP Cybersecurity Consulting Services are soundly structured to help our clients manage risks to their environment.
The KAAZING Gateway award reads, “Built by the creators of HTML5 WebSocket, the Kaazing WebSocket Gateway is the go-to solution for managing real-time communications over the Internet. It squeezes every bit of oomph out of the transport layer to ensure scalability to millions of concurrent users with minimal latency. Messaging protocols like JMS and XMPP are supported with libraries for Android, iOS, JavaScript, Flash, .Net, and Java. Version 4.0 introduced wizards that do the heavy lifting for developers, who can tap features for binary transport and delta messaging with minimal custom coding. If you’re building any type of real-time Web application or scaling up client support for an existing app, you should be looking at Kaazing to reduce resource utilization and improve performance.”
Somewhere along the line in between the 1990s and the so-called post-2000 ‘naughties’ a change occurred. This change was subtle but important if you took an interest in enterprise-level management theories, methodologies and delivery mechanisms.
Outsourcing, as we once knew it, became Business Process Outsourcing. With an extended name and an accompanying acronym to boot, BPO arrived.
Actually that’s not strictly what happened; in between outsourcing and BPO we saw outsourcing become offshore outsourcing. Functions from finance and billing to admin and support started to migrate offshore, along with other non-core operations that could be ‘manageably compartmentalized,’ so-to-speak.
The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a new construct in the information and communications technology (ICT) world that is occupying the minds of IT vendors, service providers, and systems integrators as it represents huge potential for new streams of revenue and new customers. International Data Corporation (IDC) has looked at the components, processes, and supporting IT and connectivity for the Internet of Things and expects IoT technology and services spending to generate global revenues of $4.8 trillion in 2012 and $8.9 trillion by 2020, growing at a compound annual rate (CAGR) of 7.9%.
Refusing to accept the 30 percent unemployment rate for California veterans between the ages of 18 and 24, Veterans 360 (V360) offers recently-separated combat veterans the opportunity for a solid and productive future. Using a four-pronged approach which encompasses engagement, education, employment, and healing, V360 prepares and equips veterans with the interpersonal and professional skills they will need for a successful transition back into civilian life.
In the Old West, farmers and ranchers fought range wars over water access. Now, Big Data is the new Water and there is growing tension between Business Intelligence farmers and Data Science ranchers over how the new data lake should be managed and used. SoMoClo (social, mobile, cloud) technologies and the torrent of Big Data they bring create new analytic opportunities, but taking advantage of them will requires new tools and may require new rules.