Government

American cloud service providers seeking to do business abroad are feeling the fallout from the NSA's PRISM surveillance program, suggests a month-long online survey by the Cloud Security Alliance. Fifty-six percent of more than 200 overseas respondents said they were less likely to use U.S.-based c...

Product integrity is a key element in business and increasingly important in the information technology sector, where products and services are highly vulnerable to the creation of copies and counterfeits. Both IT vendors and their customers are equally at risk when phony and faulty products enter ...

The U.S. Department of Commerce is planning a major upgrade of its customer relationship management capabilities, which is likely to include a multiyear contract opportunity for a cloud-based CRM system. The project underscores the increasing awareness of federal agencies of the potential use of clo...

The White House and eight companies including Google and Microsoft announced a joint effort to mobilize against online piracy and counterfeiting Monday with the help of a set of best practices developed in conjunction with the Interactive Advertising Bureau. The effort is designed to limit the reve...

The policy debate that has been raised by the Obama administration's healthcare reform program continues to smolder -- and even break into heated rhetoric when political supporters and critics of "Obamacare" get into the fray. However, in the three years or so that the program has been under way, it...

A U.S. Federal Trade Commissioner is urging consumers to take more control over their data. The call to action comes as revelations that the NSA is spying on Americans to an unprecedented degree continue to shake the country. Unease has been mounting over the amount of data companies are handing ove...

In a drive to reduce government computing costs, federal agencies have been required to cut and consolidate data centers. So far, agencies have reduced hundreds of operational centers -- but they still have fallen short of a five-year target set when the consolidation program was launched in Februar...

The GAO earlier this month found two key deficiencies in a cloud contract that the CIA intended to award to AWS. The GAO decision was prompted by a protest against the contract filed by IBM. GAO is the designated federal agency for handling challenges to federal contracts. The proposed contract prov...

In the wake of recent revelations that the government has been tapping their networks to monitor users, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft in recent days have all published more information about those monitoring requests. Facebook, for example, on Friday reported that for the six months ending December ...

Verizon is on the hot seat. It is at the center of the story about releasing customer information to the U.S. National Security Agency. While Verizon does make information about every call available to the NSA, the actual conversation is still private -- for now, at least. To date, Verizon has been ...

Major IT companies are hoping to seize the moment in an effort to restrain what they consider to be an abuse of intellectual property rights by so-called patent trolls. In a recent flurry of activity, lawmakers and the Obama administration have taken steps to support large IT companies seeking paten...

Private companies that do business with the U.S. government have a big stake in how federal agencies regulate the cybersecurity elements of federal contracts. As cyberthreats increase, the government is attempting to keep pace by upgrading cyber-requirements. The government has now launched a progra...

The Obama administration on Tuesday targeted patent trolls with a number of initiatives aimed at curbing activity it blames for stymieing innovation in America. The initiatives include five executive orders and seven legislative recommendations. Patent trolls have been accused of abusing the system ...

Making money from accessing the vast amounts of information collected by the U.S. government has been the basis for many commercial enterprises. The widespread use of Census Bureau data alone has been a great business resource for decades -- with a relatively new twist as a component of Google Maps....

The U.S. government is awash in data that is collected, stored and disseminated by federal agencies to fulfill their public service missions. However, the existence of huge amounts of information within the government presents a major profit-making opportunity for commercial firms. The Obama adminis...