Adoption of cloud computing technologies is exploding within the public sector, with cloud provisioning companies such as Four Points Technology LLC claiming a significant increase in federal demand. It seems as if the industry’s mission, led by giants including Amazon Web Services Inc., is succeeding, as newly cloud-cognizant government, non-profit and educational organizations go virtual. “All of the missionary work, ...

Protecting an organization’s network might be for nothing if its firewall is opening ports for voice and video communications and doesn’t know when to close them. A denial of service attack on a unified communications system can disrupt more than voice, text and video, potentially allowing hackers to access data and pass it outside of a business’ ...

Security threats loom larger every day as digital attack surfaces become larger and more dynamic and the bad guys morph fast, creating potential chaos with targeted and zero-day attacks. “A point product these days just can’t cope. … You need solutions against specific threat vectors that are applied in a dynamic way using the fabric,” said John ...

The impending death of the cloud computing has been a hot topic among venture capitalists and information technology industry analysts, including Peter Levine, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz LLC. “[The] sensor data explosion will kill the cloud,” Levine said in his talk “The End of Cloud Computing.” The much-hyped growth of the “internet of things,” which is predicted to exceed ...

Less than two years ago, Clark County School District was besieged, experiencing daily cyberattacks on an improperly protected network. The existing firewall vendor was unable to handle the problems, and chaos reigned as classes were disrupted for hours at a time. “We were undergoing about daily one-hour, two-hour [distributed denial of service] attacks, fragmented [user datagram ...

There are three words that sum up successful digital age marketing: Strategic, authentic and digestible. We all remember the days when banging your drum loudly was enough to attract customer attention, but today everyone is shouting at once, and doing nothing but enthusiastically evangelizing your brand will only trigger a smart consumer’s BS warning. “It’s ...

As the public sector moves into the digital age, Amazon Web Services Inc. has become a cloud services hero, helping the government, educational facilities and non-profits innovate and save money while benefiting mankind, according to Patricia Davis-Muffett (pictured), director of global public sector marketing at AWS. “One of the things that’s been amazing is the passion that our ...

Artificial intelligence, cloud computing and virtual and augmented reality thechnologies are allowing businesses unprecedented access to their customer’s personal wants, needs and desires, but as for-profit companies ask us to share ever more intimate details, recent breaches have exposed weaknesses in security and caused fear in consumers. After all, if giant companies such as Facebook Inc. and Equifax Inc. ...

We’re past the era of big data, when the industry focused on data storage and processing solutions. Now that we have the data, and plenty of it — the onus is now on monetizing the stored information by building business models that drive sales or increase manufacturing efficiencies, for instance. But having the capacity to collect ...

Machine learning and artificial intelligence have jumped out of science fiction and into the everyday operations of information technology so fast that even digital-first, cloud-first companies are having to run to keep pace. “As organizations are moving forward, automation, scale and machine learning are going to be increasingly important aspects of a business. How fast ...