Last week I had a great converstation over lunch with Dr. Norm Jacknis, Cisco IBSG. We discussed how cities and counties are leveraging technologies to address issues in local communities despite tight budgets. It was great to catchup in person, but I wanted to continue our conversation so Norm invited me to join him at the National Association of Counties (NACo)conference in Portland, Oregon.
The theme for the event was County Survival Strategies in Tough Economic Times and showcased counties that have leveraged technologies to reduce county operations costs and enhance service delivery.
Cisco recently completed a project in the UK with an external research firm that had some interesting data points with regards to cloud and government organizations. I previously commented on portions of this research on my personal blog, however there were some interesting findings that I thought I would share here.
Perhaps the most intriguing juxtaposition found in the study is that 34% of government respondents think security concerns are misrepresented and over-emphasized, while security and privacy concerns are also seen as the biggest barrier to wider adoption of cloud in government (86%). The next biggest concern was about the location of data (70%), showing that data sovereignty will continue to be a major issue for government agencies wanting to move into the cloud. At a recent Public Sector CIO dialogue I attended in London, there was clear tension between the desire for agencies to use smaller, more local vendors, while desiring the confidence of going with a large, established IT player that may be more secure, but usually has multiple data centers in multiple countries. Read More »
There is a lot of buzz out there right now about Telework Solutions for Government as many agencies are making the transition that so many Corporations have already completed. Personally, I haven’t worked full time in an office since pre-1996 and can’t imagine wasting that much time every day on preparations and commuting for no real purpose other than donuts, coffee and the latest office gossip.
Work is an activity, not a location in today’s professional world with pervasive networking capabilities and the Government is getting on board under the leadership of the current administration.
If you want to get a feel for the progress and momentum around this, check out the public/private partnership at the Telework Exchange site focused on eliminating the Telework Gridlock. Cisco is one of the sponsors of this activity because we see the value, have lived it for better than 15 years, and can offer solutions to help make this a reality for our Government customers. Read More »
There is a large installed base of Catalyst 6500 series switches in the US Public Sector Community. Cisco continues to protect this investment by developing new capabilities to enable the Borderless Networks of the future. The innovation in the new “Sup2T” triples the performance of the existing 6K platforms. You can hear Host Jennifer Geisler speak with Kumar Srikantan, Vice President of Product Management for the Scalable Networks Business Unit , discuss the Catalyst 6500.
I’ve had some recent discussions with colleagues in the armed forces regarding cyber security and how they consider “cyber” to be the fourth warfighting domain along with land, air, and sea. They describe how cyber has its own terrain made up of computing resources. As I further thought through this concept I saw a striking resemblance between the network and air warfare. To elaborate on this thought I must first set the context around the concept of air supremacy.
There are probably many different variations of the definition of air supremacy but let’s just use “the degree of air superiority wherein the opposing air force is incapable of effective interference” for the purpose of this blog. I borrowed this definition from NATO. There are two key words in the definition, “degree” and “effective.” Prior to achieving supremacy one must first move from parity, through superiority to eventually supremacy. Air parity is the lowest degree in which a force can control the skies above friendly units. In other words, prevention of opposing air assets from overwhelming land, air, and sea units. Read More »
conference in Portland, Oregon. 
