Bob Gourley, former CTO of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), is Founder and CTO of Crucial Point LLC, a technology research and advisory firm providing fact based technology reviews in support of venture capital, private equity and emerging technology firms. He has extensive industry experience in intelligence and security and was awarded an intelligence community meritorious achievement award by AFCEA in 2008, and has also been recognized as an Infoworld Top 25 CTO and as one of the most fascinating communicators in Government IT by GovFresh.
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When talking with the less-technical people in your enterprise, which may include end users and many others on the leadership team, it always pays to have non technical expressions to describe new capabilities. Here are some thoughts on Platfora that may be of use in discussions like t...May. 17, 2013 06:15 AM EDT Reads: 1,054
By Bob GourleyYou don’t have to convince government IT leaders of the smart new business models, efficiencies and performance enhancements available with cloud computing. Like IT professionals everywhere, federal technologists get it. But things are different in the federal commu...
There are several certainties in computer security. One is that when adversaries have intent they will always find a way to get what they want. Another certainty is that leadership in government and industry is quick to forget the lessons learned in cyber security, especially those dea...
Here is the top tech news and stories for Tuesday (sorry about the delay). Firefox for Tablets updated with speed and power - one of the top mobile browsers is Firefox. Their latest update mirrors the most recent smartphone update. Unlike many mobile browsers, Firefox supports Flash. V...
Do you remember service-oriented architecture (SOA)? This concept led to tremendous new capabilities and efficient, mission-focused designs. Enterprises established architectures in which application interfaces, logic and data were separated and smartly reusable. After the term went ma...
Big Data is the data too large, complex, and fast-moving for conventional information infrastructure to handle. There’s been a lot of buzz about investment in cutting edge Big Data solutions and start ups, and for good reason. Venture capital for Big Data is sizable and growing.
Researchers Show How to Crack Android Encryption – Thomas Cannon and Seyton Bradford have successfully shown brute force attacks against Android encryption at DEFCON. Because Android encryption is based on the Linux dm-crypt, it is easily broken on either Android 3.x or 4.x devi...
Here are today’s top tech news stories. Bitcoin, the underground currency of the Internet, is experiencing speculative growth - there have been a few things pushing up the value of the Bitcoin, including a drug purchasing version of eBay. There are now “High Yield Investmen...
In the emerging multi-tenant cloud, the old rules of vendor lock-in are rapidly changing. A network virtualization platform must be able to operate on top of any network hardware, much like x86 server hypervisors work on top of any server. This independence means the physical network c...
Network Virtualization represents the most significant innovation in networking since the inventions of Ethernet and the multi-protocol router, two technologies pioneered to level the playing field for device connectivity. Network Virtualization is an emerging technology that will pro...
Cleversafe provides dispersed storage solutions that give infinite scale and cost-effective data storage/protection/access. Apache Hadoop and the CDH4 distribution provides all the required software for implementing MapReduce and the other chores associated with analysis over massive q...
At AT&T Labs in Florham Park, New Jersey, big data is being used to analyze the traffic and movement patterns of people through data generated by their mobile phones to help improve policymaking and urban and traffic planning. The research team realized they could understand deep patte...
The greatest source of potential use cases for technology is the user community. This is a great reason to attend events where customers are at the center of focus. This was what last month’s Splunk Live DC was like. Splunk is a very user-focused capability and when you create a ...
Here is today’s federal cybersecurity and information technology news: IBM and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are working together on the Vulcan supercomputer to analyze data for developing new technologies in applied energy, green energy, manufacturing, data manageme...
We recently wrote about TechAmerica and their activities related to Big Data in the Public Sector. A Big Data Task Force in TechAmerica’s public sector group has kicked off a collaborative activity in a Big Data Task Force.
There has been a new development in domain. The foundation a...
The New York Times revealed June 1st what many experts had already asserted regarding the United States role in the Stuxnet attack. While speculation of U.S. involvement complicated international relations on cyber conflict, an acknowledgement of U.S. involvement in a forum such as the...
This year at Splunk Live, CTOvision editor and Crucial Point CTO Bob Gourley provided a keynote on predicting the future of information technology, outlining some of his methods and what we can learn from each. 
HBase is an open source data base with some very special features you should take note of. This post provides some context of hBase. Most of this information was gleaned from the great reference material at Cloudera.com, which has become the go-to site for learning about Big Data appro...
Today’s federal cybersecurity and information technology news: The U.S. Office of Naval Research is partnering with Chilean scientists to develop a mobile application to provide information helpful in countering pirates, arms traffickers, and illegal fishermen. More here. The Arm...
Today’s federal cybersecurity and information technology news round-up: The proposed Social Networking Online Protection Act (SNOPA) would make it illegal for employers to demand access rto social media accounts. More here. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has reques...
Study after study refutes the myth that cybersecurity is compromised by malicious, brilliant hackers. Advanced persistent threats, state-sponsored hackers, and foreign intelligence agencies are serious threats, especially to major targets, but the vast majority of breaches and leaks re...
Good news for Big Data users: Cloudera recently released the second and final beta for Cloudera’s Distribution Including Apache Hadoop version 4 (CDH4), meaning that the official CDH4 release is coming soon. If you aren’t already using CDH, Cloudera offers the leading open-source...
Dion Hinchcliffe of Dachis Group is one of the brightest minds in the nation today. For years he has helped individuals and organizations think through complex challenges. And for years he has proven he can glean trends and impart their relevance to decision-makers. He is world renowne...
One of the sessions I attended at FOSE 2012 was titled: “What the Research Shows: The Future of Mobile.” It featured two researchers, Dr. David Metcalf of the University of Central Florida, and Aaron Smith, of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. These gentlemen focu...
The T in ETL, or the “transform” stage of “extract, transform, load” data process, rarely gets the spotlight in the Big Data revolution, but it’s one of the most challenging and important elements in turning raw data into intelligence. 
Yesterday, the White House demonstrated its support for Big Data in a huge way. Federal agencies have committed over $200M to big data initiatives in the future. Between the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, Department of Defense, Defense Advanced Research Proj...
On Thursday 29 March 2012 from 2:00pm to 3:30pm EDT the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) will hold an event focused on “Big Data” Research and Development. 
Let’s get started, I’m not in love w/ the new naming system for the iPad. “New” should never be in any products name, let alone a real piece of technology (will the next one be New New? or New and Improved iPad?). Ridiculous.
Since the European ITSEC and US TCSEC product security evaluation mechanisms were merged into the Common Criteria in around 1998, lots of vendors’ product literature has sported EAL numbers regarding how well-tested their products are. What isn’t typically seen in such documents, thoug...
With the continued rise in home-based and mobile working, the possibility of people being forced to access and potentially modify data during encounters with ne’er-do-wells becomes a genuine security issue. For example, while there haven’t been many cases reported yet, the ...
I know of only three models that enterprise technologists can use to make accurate predictions of future technology, and all three models have failings. The first model is to track mega trends in the IT industry. This provides broad insights on topics like Big Data, Cloud Computing, Cy...
Like my colleague Alex Olesker, I too attended Cloudera Day 2012. While there were many panels of interest, perhaps one of the most important was Amr Awadallah‘s talk about big data applications to business intelligence. Many CTOVision readers with backgrounds in the intelligenc...
CumuLogic is a cloud computing company founded by Sun Microsystems’ alumni. The company has developed a Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) software that makes it easier and faster to develop and deploy Java applications (apps) in the cloud. By automating the management of the runtime en...
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 netwo...
On 26 January 2011 government IT professionals, federally-focused systems integrators and IT vendors met in the Government Big Data Forum to dialog on issues of common concern on the topic of overwhelming data. This event, sponsored by Carahsoft, included presentations, discussions, pa...
Alistair Croll of Bitcurrent, an analysis and research firm, set out to explain all about the cloud. A big cloud advocate myself, I was interested in hearing his thoughts, and hopefully gaining some tips and tricks along the way.
Alistair first highlighted Nicholas Carr’s “The Big...
