As the November election approaches, the Federal government sits on high pressure to cut spending to check an ever growing national deficit. The Effect: Budget cuts and fat trimming by all agencies throughout the public sector.

The technology phenomenon that is cloud computing is one that has spread like wildfire throughout the private sector. However, despite an ever-growing IT establishment, the Federal government has been much more prudent in their shift toward cloud computing. According to many Federal IT professionals, inefficiency, the need for consolidation and pending budget cuts has clearly made cloud computing a solution in dire necessity. The Department of Defense in specific is facing an estimated $178 billion budget cut over the next several years, reforming their IT system is a ploy that could potentially save them nearly $37 billion. Yet despite the potential savings for this department and many similar situations alike, a recent surveyof Federal agencies showed that over 96% of the agencies have less than 1/3 of their IT infrastructure on cloud computing. So why is this the case?

With the upcoming presidential election, the “Green Movement” is undoubtedly going to be a topic of discussion between the two candidates. Recently, the movement has made monumental steps in raising awareness all around the country. The demand for environmentally-friendly, also known as “green” products has increased so much because of a policy that requires 95% contract actions to be green. Sales of these products through GSAAdvantage! ® has increased by almost 80% from October 2011 to May 2012. With such an increase in demand, there is no better time to get involved in the movement than now. Since there is such an incredible amount of hype around this movement, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney cannot ignore this topic. With such polarizing stances on the issue, the candidates will find it hard to ignore the movement as a whole. It will be interesting to see how the different constituencies will stand on the issue of “Go Green.” This movement has even dwelled into the likes of the economy; it just brings it to the forefront for an entirely different group of people.

Despite rumors of a looming fiscal cliff and a harsh reality for contractors, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the General Services Administration (GSA) are finalizing major IT acquisitions. These two technology contracts are expected to exceed $5 billion and $1.5 billion respectively. The VA is looking to award funding by September 30th and the GSA is releasing an RFI this week for continuous monitoring systems.

Social media has so rapidly become a ubiquitous part of our day to day lives. In 2008, only 29% of adult internet users said they used a social networking site, and now according to Pew Research that number has risen above 65%. Now more and more organizations are realizing the significance of social media. If this resource is not utilized not only will your organization miss out on the myriad of benefits that emerge from it, but your organization will also fall behind the rest. Customer Service optimization is one of the attributes of social media that can be extremely useful, and still many organizations utilizing social media don’t take advantage.

n a recent mobile strategy document released by the Department of Defense (DoD), they addressed the need to strengthen the efficiency of its workforce and operations and construct its business to be more relatable to today’s modern workplace and clientele. The document went on to explain this implementation would involve addressing 3 major goals for the department; “Advance and evolve the DoD Information Enterprise infrastructure to support mobile devices, institute mobile device policies and standards, and promote the development and use of DoD mobile and web-enabled applications.” This strategy “identifies the vision and goals for capitalizing on the full potential of mobile devices and supports the end-user services approach in DoD Information Technology Enterprise Strategy and Roadmap,” states Chief Information Officer, Teri Takai. In order to evolve into this developing strategy, the Department has stated that it must better familiarize itself with management methods of better utilizing available spectrum and also “develop mechanisms for rapidly transitioning technologies into programs of record.” DoD’s new enterprise infrastructure and wireless networks must have the capability to support both unclassified and classified high-bandwidth traffic, a critical up kept stream of wireless coverage to in-building and terrestrial locations, and also various networking architectures. This architecture must maintain a security between the interface of DoD networks and commercial networks by empowering a proper management of mobile devices, applications, and network connections.