Cutting Government Cost: Uniting Finance & Technology for Innovation

By more closely aligning finance and technology initiatives, you can cut costs and reduce expenses throughout your organization—and still provide the innovation to best serve citizens. Read this Center for Digital Government paper to learn how smart investing in IT modernization can deliver higher productivity and performance gains outside of IT.

Sponsored by Cisco.

Exadata For Dummies

Complimentary EBook

Managing a mass of disjointed database servers, storage devices, and networks is no way to run a database shop. Consolidating your database and storage into a single database machine simplifies management and drives down costs. Oracle’s Exadata provides Capacity on Demand computing through high performance and reliable Oracle RAC databases and optimized storage server architecture. Stop struggling to meet requirements and start excelling with Exadata!

With this book, you find out how Oracle RAC database servers integrate with storage servers to provide speed and reliability. You also find out how to scale systems to meet your needs by adding Quarter, Half, and Full Racks of database and storage capacity to support any database processing environment. And, along the way, you discover how Exadata allows you to consolidate existing database environments into a cost-effective, Capacity on Demand environment.

Sponsored by DLT Solutions and Oracle.

Acrobat X: A Strategic Choice for Enterprise-Wide Productivity

A Study of Knowledge Worker Collaboration Workflows

Document creation and distribution is a core activity for knowledge workers and is an increasingly collaborative one. One of the most pressing questions facing IT decision-makers is the optimal desktop software image to support this activity, especially as collaboration expands to include more people both inside and outside the organization.

In attempting to answer this question, IT may overlook a powerful collaborative tool, Adobe Acrobat X, which offers many productivity benefits. In combination with productivity software such as Microsoft Office 2010 and back-end collaborative solutions such as Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Adobe Acrobat X can greatly increase knowledge worker productivity for collaborative document creation, review, and distribution.

Learn more about Adobe Acrobat X in this free whitepaper.

Sponsored by Adobe and GovConnection.

Unleashing Cloud Performance

Want to eliminate spiraling cost and complexity of your IT infrastructure? Riverbed can help by delivering cloud services with LAN-like performance across your organization. In this whitepaper, we explore how WAN optimization from Riverbed can deliver on the promise of accelerated cloud performance for widely distributed enterprises.

Sponsored by Riverbed.

The 3 Barriers to IT Infrastructure Consolidation

Federal, state, and local government agencies are making the strategic choice to consolidate remote site IT infrastructure into central data centers. The stumbling block to consolidation, however, is the severe impact on application performance as seen by remote users. Relocating local servers to a data center and connecting them across a wide area network (WAN) link often results in order-of magnitude slowdowns to response times and data transfer rates. At these levels of delay business processes are impacted forcing site consolidation efforts to be stalled.

This whitepaper addresses how government agencies can overcome the three principal barriers to consolidation: constrained WAN bandwidth, TCP throughput drop-off with latency, and the effect of latency on application chattiness.

Sponsored by Riverbed.

5 Steps to Successful IT Consolidation & Virtualization

Has your Enterprise made the strategic decision to consolidate remote site IT infrastructure into central data centers? Then you have probably discovered that consolidation projects are fraught with technical, organization, and implementation challenges that require a well thought-out strategy. Download this paper by Riverbed and discover a clear 5-step approach to making sure every consolidation project is successful.

Sponsored by Riverbed.

Accelerating Secure Networks for the Federal Government

Identifying Security is a concern for all enterprises. Organizations in many industries - from government to financial services to healthcare - have to protect sensitive information, and in many cases comply with specific regulations to ensure the proper safeguarding of data. Recent security breaches have fueled significant growth in the number of security offerings and standards in the marketplace. This paper explores WAN optimization leader Riverbed Technology's secure WAN optimization capabilities in more detail.

Sponsored by Riverbed.

Server & Storage Virtualization

An i360Gov Special Report.

Government organizations are working hard to do more with less, consolidating data centers and striving to deliver more services online to help lower operating costs and comply with federal regulatory mandates such as the Office of Management and Budget’s 25-Point Plan to Reform Federal IT.

A big part of the ongoing consolidation efforts includes virtualization, putting more applications on fewer servers to save space and reduce complexity in government data centers. Trouble is, virtualization implementation efforts in many organizations have slowed, partly due to the difficulties that arise in the management and control of rampant storage growth.

Read this special report to learn more, including interviews with industry experts and best-practice advice.

Sponsored by DLT Solutions, NetApp and Red Hat.

A New IT Consolidation Mantra

An i360Gov Special Report.

As most state budgets continue to decrease, government officials grapple regularly with which IT initiatives to approve. Consolidation has taken hold as a way to renovate IT, update systems and applications, and identify shared functions that may help states and localities stretch IT dollars to meet ever-growing demands for new and better constituent services.

A heightened focus on performance management and IT modernization are driving streamlining for everything from data centers, to email, to billing and constituent-facing services.

Read this i360Gov special report that highlights key state and local government IT consolidation efforts currently under way, and lays out the key steps public sector audiences must take to reduce risks, improve transparency and automate where possible to reduce IT management burdens.

Sponsored by Symantec.

Oracle Databases on VMware - Use Cases

Use cases and benefits delivered by virtualizing Oracle databases on VMware vSphere.

Production database administrators are primarily concerned with scalability, performance and overall resource management. Deploying Oracle databases on vSphere is not significantly different from deploying Oracle on physical servers.

Database architects can take advantage of the features and capabilities of vSphere to create their enterprise database strategy and next-generation scalable architectures. This paper provides use cases and benefits delivered by virtualizing Oracle databases on VMware vSphere.

Sponsored by VMware.

A Practical Guide for Retiring Legacy Applications

Need to know how to retire a legacy application and the supporting software and hardware stack, and still keep the data easily and inexpensively accessible for reporting, regulatory compliance, and regular business needs?

This paper discusses how to decide which legacy applications should be retired and strategies for retiring them wisely. You'll learn the seven key steps involved in legacy retirement. It also introduces the key advantages of the Informatica solution for application retirement.

Sponsored by Informatica.

Software License Management

A new whitepaper from Belarc.  Why spend so much money on unused software and maintenance? One-half of most software budgets is spent on maintaining existing software. This is an excellent opportunity to significantly reduce annual IT expenses, and improve IT security.  Please send an email to whitepapers@belarc.com requesting our white paper or click on the whitepaper title above.

Sponsored by Belarc.

EMC Geospatial Information System (GIS) Cloud Solution for the Public Sector

No two GIS implementations in public sector are the same. Most agencies already deploy at least one—and often more than one—GIS application. They operate different workflows and processes, but what is consistent is the need to capture, analyze, and display exploding volumes of geographical information across multiple public sector departments. To aggregate,
deduplicate, and make consistent your multiple pools of GIS data into one shared repository is the mandate for today.

With the EMC GIS Cloud solution, you can do that. You’ll become more efficient in the way you manage your GIS data. Your operating costs will decline. Citizens and staff will become more empowered. Ultimately, you’ll gain more business value from the information, rather than spending all your resources and time just managing it.

Download this informative whitepaper to learn more.

Sponsored by EMC.

Leveraging Continuous Monitoring to Gain Greater Situational Awareness

An i360Gov Special Report.

For the federal government to achieve a stronger cyber security posture, agencies must focus on automation, interoperability and authentication, according to officials from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

The current federal focus on continuous monitoring will help agencies achieve the level of automation required to dramatically improve their ability to assess and respond to risks. But DHS, NIST and other observers say standards are still needed to increase interoperability, and authentication guidance is also required to protect user identities in cyberspace.

Sponsored by Symantec.

Overcoming Obstacles to HIE Rollouts: A Guide for State and Local Executives

For the last several years, state and local CIOs have worked to foster the exchange of data between medical providers and health insurance plans.  However, building out such networks has been a long, painful journey for public sector CIOs, who have encountered complex technical and administrative challenges in implementing them.

Finally, after long study, technical and administrative solutions are emerging that can create scalable, flexible networks capable of leveraging the immense flows of data they generate.

In this paper, we will offer an overview of state and local health IT priorities and explain
how health information exchanges (HIEs) fit in. After looking at obstacles CIOs face in
implementing health information exchanges, we will describe solutions to some of the
pressing problems government IT leaders face when rolling out HIEs.

Sponsored by DLT Solutions and Informatica.

i360Gov Proof Points: Tracking the Use of Private Clouds

Underscoring the confusion that surrounds the early stage development of cloud computing in government, a recent survey of government executives reported that 56% of respondents said they had not started, or had no plans to deploy a private cloud environment within their organizations.

The online survey, sponsored by VMware and GovConnection, was conducted by i360Gov Custom Research in February 2011. In the survey, 143 government executives provided insights on their understanding and acceptance of private cloud computing at this ‘still early’ stage in the evolution toward cloud-based environments.

Sponsored by GovConnection and VMware.

i-Future: Revisiting Information Sharing,Exchange and Interoperability

Although some federal, state and local government entities have used information exchanges for years, those agencies and the nation as a whole are still in the very early days of standardizing data and sending it across networks of multiple partners.

The benefits that information exchange initiatives can bring to government at every level - federal, state and local - are substantial and can be seen in the successful examples of the Defense Logistics Agency, the Indiana State Department of Health and in the state of Colorado.

Download this complimentary whitepaper to learn more.

Sponsored by Informatica.

Best Practices Guide: Microsoft Exchange 2010 on VMware

This guide provides best practice guidelines for deploying Exchange Server 2010 on vSphere. The recommendations in this guide are not specific to any particular set of hardware or to the size and scope of any particular Exchange implementation. The examples and considerations in this document provide guidance only and do not represent strict design requirements, as the flexibility of Exchange Server 2010 on vSphere allows for a wide variety of valid configurations.

The ideal platform for Exchange would adapt easily to changing workloads, provide flexibility to accommodate changing demands on an organization’s IT infrastructure, remain reliable and resilient despite system outages, and improve both staff and infrastructure hardware effectiveness. A new operational platform based on VMware vSphere™ can accomplish these goals.

Sponsored by VMware.

From Datacenter Consolidation to the Cloud

An i360Gov Special Report.

The marching orders have been delivered. By 2015, federal IT organizations have been told they must consolidate datacenters by 40%, for an overall reduction of 800 datacenters. Trouble is, how do agencies get there from here?

Most federal datacenters are already working to transition away from siloed, traditional datacenters, to more responsive, servicesbased IT operations. Agencies clearly understand datacenter consolidation efforts will reduce the costs of hardware, software, and operations by decommissioning underutilized equipment, applications and data. Consolidation also lowers maintenance and personnel costs. Shifting IT investments to more efficient computing technologies will also reduce ongoing equipment and operational costs.

Sponsored by VMware.

Best Practices for Achieving Migration to a Cloud Model

An i360Gov Special Report.

Recent initiatives, including the just-published Federal Cloud Computing Strategy, the 25-point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal IT Management published in December and its accompanying ‘Cloud First’ acquisition strategy are forcing federal agencies to figure out how to quickly ‘get their IT operations in shape’ to embrace cloud computing.

i360Gov's special report, "Best Practices for Achieving Migration to a Cloud Model", explores the steps agencies should take to aid their migration to cloud-based operations.

Sponsored by DLT Solutions, NetApp and Red Hat.