What You Need to Know from GITEC 2015

The 2015 GITEC Summit, held the past three days in Baltimore, featured more than 200 government and industry leaders discussing some of the biggest issues facing federal technology leaders today. Here are news and notes from the conference.

• What's the garlic mode of secuirty? You've like heard of the onion model and the donut model, but Alen Kirkorian, division chief of the Office of Innovation, Strategy and Security at the State Department, describes the garlic model as "security enclaves tied together in a hub.” That structure lets organizations isolate separate environments for different user groups.
• Kimberly Hancher, CIO at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, said that while bring-your-own-device growth in the federal government has been flat in recent years, she expects it to increase as more millennials enter government. “It’s just a matter of when,” she said.
• The Health Resources and Services Administration, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, spent $20 million on employee travel in 2010. To reduce that, the agency turned to Adobe Connect to host more virtual conferences. In 2014, the agency spent only $4 million on travel with employees using Connect for more than 150,000 hours in fiscal year 2014 alone, says HRSA CIO Adriane Burton.
• The Environmental Protection Agency plans to allow users to sign in with Google and other publicly available personal identifiers to access the agency’s Central Data Exchange system. “We have a certain level of trust with these programs that we can leverage for parts of this program,” CIO Ann Dunkin says. For some services, though, users will have to go through an EPA-owned identification process.
• Quoting Gartner, Kirkorian said 95 percent of mobile security breaches are related to configuration. He said government is not alone in being challenged to secure mobile devices —Fortune 500 companies face the same issues and lack the human resources to maintain multiple solutions.
• HRSA plans to expand its data management team and is hiring a new data warehouse architect.
• From Kevin Plexico, Deltek vice president of information solutions: The federal civilian agency IT budget continues to grow ($44.4 billion in fiscal year 2014 to a requested $49.1 billion for fiscal 2016) while the Defense Department has remained flat, hovering around $37.5 billion during the same period. Plexico is optimistic that number will begin to grow again, post-sequestration.
• Hancher, who has an IT budget of between $14 million and $20 million, said she strongly believes in strategic sourcing to help her agency get the most technology for its money.