Bob Gourley

On January 19, Carahsoft hosted a webinar on Big Data success in government with Bob Gourley and Omer Trajman of Cloudera.  Bob began by explaining the current state of Big Data in the government.   There are 4 areas of significant activity in Big Data. Federal integrators are making large investments in research and development of solutions.  Large firms like Lockhead Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, QinetiQ, SAIC as well as smaller “boutique” organizations have made major contributions. The Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community have been major adopters of Big Data solutions to handle intelligence and information overload. Typically, they use Big Data technology to help analysts “connect the dots” and “find a needle in a haystack.” The national labs under the Department of Energy have been developing and implementing Big Data solutions for research ... (more)

Big Data Fights Crime: The FBI’s Next Generation Identification

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been in the Big Data business since 1999 when it launched the  Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), the world’s largest biometric database on individuals. IAFIS contains over 55 million sets of fingerprints and is used by law enforcement agencies nationwide for criminal investigations and civil background checks. To keep pace of the evolution of biometrics as well as the ever-growing demand for information, the FBI is now incrementally upgrading to a system  it calls Next Generation Identification (NGI). Through ... (more)

What You Need To Know About FedRAMP

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a government-wide program established in December 2011 to speed the adoption of cloud computing. FedRAMP includes a set of requirements for federal cloud computing and universal procedures for approving services and providers to work with the government. When contractors feel that they have met FedRAMP requirements, they must have their security control implementations independently verified and validated by a FedRAMP accredited Third Party Assessment Organization for compliance which then submits  a security as... (more)

Mobile Continues to Trickle in to the Military

We’ve recently heard a few big announcements for mobile computing in the military, which has long been blocked by security issues. First, the US Defense Information Systems Agency approved Dell Android 2.2 for use on Department of Defense networks with a few notable limitations. DoD users won’t be able to access either classified data or the Android app store.  Currently only one device, the Dell Venue smartphone, runs Dell Android 2.2, so the benefits of mobile and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) will not yet to be fully realized, but the future looks bright for Android in the mi... (more)

Case Study: Navy Marine Corps Intranet and VMware Infrastructure

The Navy Marine Corps Intranet is the largest individual network in the world. The only larger network is the Internet. This huge network sprawl requires a great deal of strategy, concern and planning. Over 700,000 users rely on the intranet to receive IT services. This is a huge network, and the NMCI cannot afford to be behind the eight-ball. NMCI uses VMware Infrastructure for a few different reasons. The first is to virtualize Microsoft Exchange Servers. They host over 350k users on VMware servers. NMCI can run five virtualized exchange servers on every single physical server.... (more)