Author Archive
Joab Jackson
Joab Jackson is the senior technology editor for Government Computer News.
Infrastructure
Cloud computing disarms State Department's worries over fast system deployment
Cloud computing offers a tantalizing promise of savings. But how can an agency test new cloud-based services without compromising the mission? The State Department might have found a new technique: Test cloud services with workgroup-portioned projects.
- By Joab Jackson
Infrastructure
GSA adds up cloud savings
The General Services Administration estimates it can save as much as $1.7 million a year by switching its USA.gov search Web site to a cloud computing infrastructure. Here's how the numbers break down.
- By Joab Jackson
Cybersecurity
Attempted break-ins are, almost, an everyday thing
More than half of federal IT professionals have to deal with some sort of cybersecurity-related incidents at least once a week, and almost a third deal with incidents daily, according to a survey.
- By Joab Jackson
Infrastructure
A-Space melds social media and intelligence gathering
With A-Space, a social-networking site for intelligence analysts, the Defense Intelligence Agency wants to extend electronic collaboration into the creation of intelligence.
- By Joab Jackson
Digital Government
NASA program proves the benefits of social networking
The NASAsphere pilot program showed how social networking could best be useful -- namely by allowing people to join a conversation and contribute valuable details that might have not surfaced otherwise. Approximately 93 percent of questions posted to the community were answered by users at different NASA centers.
- By Joab Jackson
Cybersecurity
Locking down Windows with virtualization
Red Hat thinks it can apply NSA-level security to Windows from the outside.
- By Joab Jackson
Management
Warning crooks: Bucks County, Pa., has your number
Seven police departments within Bucks County, Pa. are using software that allow their police officers to share basic criminal information while on their beats.
- By Joab Jackson
Infrastructure
White House friends GSA, comments on social media
GSA's Bev Godwin, recently returned from a six-month detail to the White House, talks about the advantages of using social media to connect with the public and balancing the ease of using Web 2.0 tools with the challenges of meeting government regulations.
- By Joab Jackson
Infrastructure
Energy labs jostle for top supercomputer honors
Los Alamos National Laboratory falls out of the supercomputer top spot.
- By Joab Jackson
Infrastructure
Open-source tools could make it easier to build a hybrid cloud
Government agencies interested in building out privately-run internal clouds have a growing number of open-source tools to work with.
- By Joab Jackson
Management
Towns host each other's recovery data
Two Tennessee towns find a COOP solution
- By Joab Jackson
Infrastructure
The Web's next act: A worldwide database
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the Web, wants to create a worldwide Web database, and he wants government agencies to lead the way.
- By Joab Jackson
Emerging Tech
2 examples of how government data linking can work
At the International Semantic Web Conference, data linking experts gave examples of how linking government data can work — one involving agency spending data and one on sharing IT architectures.
- By Joab Jackson
Infrastructure
How the Semantic Web would work
Rendering data into the Resource Description Framework can make it easier to interpose it with other sets of data to create entirely new datasets and visualizations, researchers from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute said during a demonstration.
- By Joab Jackson
Infrastructure
Cloud computing could generate big-time savings
A Booz Allen Hamilton analysis quantifies the potential savings agencies could get on hardware and support costs by moving to cloud computing.
- By Joab Jackson
Emerging Tech
IPv4 addresses almost gone
The Internet will run out of unused Internet Protocol version 4 Internet addresses soon, predicts the American Registry for Internet Numbers.
- By Joab Jackson
Digital Government
Is PDF hurting transparency?
At least one transparency advocacy group says PDF, championed by Adobe, inhibits the easy re-use of data.
- By Joab Jackson
Emerging Tech
Plasmonics: A new hope for the post-silicon era
A new way of compressing light could lead to faster computers, scientists predict
- By Joab Jackson