GSA CIO Coleman Joins AT&T Government Solutions

Deputy CIO Sonny Hashmi named acting CIO of General Services Administration. Most Wasteful Government IT Projects Of 2013 (click image for larger view and for slideshow) After greater than a decade on the General Services Administration, CIO Casey Coleman is leaving for the non-public sector, joining AT&T Government Solutions as an executive VP for client relations. Sonny Hashmi, GSA’s deputy CIO, will function acting CIO. “Advances in cloud, mobility, big data, and security present federal organizations with a brand new world of opportunities,” Coleman said in an announcement about her decision to go back to the non-public sector. “Casey is celebrated and revered throughout the federal technology sector as a real leader,” said Kay Kapoor, president of AT&T Government Solutions, praising Coleman’s “visionary leadership, technological know-how, and public sector expertise.” During her tenure at GSA, Coleman led the government’s first migration to the cloud, using the Google Apps for presidency platform for email and collaboration. The move saved GSA greater than $15 million over five... Read More »

Welcome To The hot InformationWeek

We’re abandoning the old, one-way publishing model of economic technology journalism and pioneering an approach that emphasizes community and true multiway discourse. Thanks to digital innovation, our media industry has undergone a generation’s worth of upheaval over the last five years. We bet your industry has too. Do not get too comfortable: The pace of change is purely accelerating. As digital technologies enhance products, change customer consumption habits, disintermediate supply-chain players, help buyers and sellers make more informed, data-based decisions, and otherwise overturn the established order, every company is (or can be) sweating who its next disruptive competitors could be. Which competitor is FedEx most worried about? UPS, obviously, but it’s keeping a miles closer eye nowadays on considered one of its biggest partners, Amazon.com, as Amazon becomes more of a business services and logistics provider. And guess who just beat out old nobody-got-fired-for-choosing-IBM for a prized CIA cloud computing contract? Amazon. Cablevision CEO James Dolan, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in... Read More »

Microsoft Launches Cybercrime Center

Microsoft expands global role supporting law enforcement, government, and businesses fighting cybercrime. 9 Android Apps To enhance Security, Privacy (click image for larger view) Microsoft has unveiled its latest effort to combat cyberthreats with the outlet of its new Cyber Crime Center. The state-of-the-art operations facility, located on Microsoft’s Redmond, Wash., campus, provides specialists with an array of advanced tools to imagine and identify cyberthreats around the globe. The center will not be simply for Microsoft, though. Along with the technical experts who can track criminal activities, the middle is operating closely with law enforcement agencies, customers, and academics to develop tips on how to keep the general public safe from cyber criminals. Microsoft is likewise including legal experts who can advise the most effective how to navigate international law. “The guts provides an unprecedented opportunity to assemble those with different expertise — engineers, investigators, lawyers, etc. — and equip them with the smartest tools and technology available,” Bonnie MacNaughton, assistant general counsel for the... Read More »

Google Compute Engine Generally Available With Lower Prices And More Linux Support

[ Developer] Last year, Google unveiled Compute Engine at Google I/O, apparently looking to compete with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure for the cloud computing needs of companies. In May, Google made it available for every person, and added sub-hour billing charges for instances in a single-minute increments, shared-core instances, advanced routing features and disk support for as much as 10 terabytes per volume. Today, Google announced general availability with a 99.95% monthly SLA and 24/7 support, and has launched support for Red Hat, SUSE, FreeBSD, and all other Linux variants. They’ve also added three new 16-core instance types in limited preview. Google has also lowered prices for normal instances by 10% in all regions. “You now have virtual machines that experience the performance, reliability, security and scale of Google’s own infrastructure,” says Greg DeMichillie, director of product management. “At Google, we’ve found that regular maintenance of hardware and software infrastructure is significant to operating with a high level of reliability, security and function,”... Read More »

Facebook Updates App Insights To Be Cleaner, More Reliable

[ Developer] For the past few years, Facebook app developers have trusted App Insights to profit how consumers use their app. While it’s certainly already a terrific tool, Facebook thinks it’s going to improve it to make it even better for developers. Facebook announced this afternoon that it’s going to be rolling out App Insights 2.0 in beta form today. The newly updated toolset allows developers to collect much more information on how their app is getting used alongside plenty of other useful information, including traffic sources. To start us off, Facebook says that it has completely redesigned the interface to be easier to navigate. Furthermore, the recent interface was “designed around how your apps integrate with Facebook instead of how users interact with Facebook.” What all this implies is that Facebook will now show you metrics like New Logins, Stories and Referrals at the front page. Check it out: Facebook has also re-organized metric data so developers can easily compare data across their very... Read More »