Top 10 Blog Posts of 2020

Posted on by The Carahsoft Team

2020 was an unprecedented year with certain trends in technology developing practically overnight. IT solutions such as cybersecurity and workflow automation became more important than ever as many across the nation began working from home. During this time, Government agencies have become more adaptable, security-focused, and driven to ensure the digital experience has and continues to be successful. Here’s a look back at our Top 10 Carahsoft Community Blog posts of 2020 featuring this year’s most popular IT topics.

1) IT TRENDS IN GOVERNMENT: The Cloud and Electronic Signatures

Digital experiences are at the center of most services that citizens utilize day-to-day, and throughout government they can impact access to important services, such as healthcare, food aid, and housing. In order to ensure that these services are adequately accessible to the public, proper measures must be taken to make content available across devices, adaptable for use by all users regardless of physical ability, and consistent in appearance.

The best way to achieve digital experiences that adhere to the aforementioned criteria is to utilize the appropriate technology, such as form creation software and electronic signature platforms, which are becoming increasingly prevalent. In this post, Carahsoft’s Senior Product Specialist, Ashley Weston, examines two of Government’s top IT trends to achieving key digital experiences—form creation and e-signatures.

2) How Federal Agencies Can Achieve Section 508 Compliance

Technology has enabled users with visual or other impairments to more easily navigate the world around them, and government organizations are increasingly expected to abide by basic digital accessibility standards and to comply with federal requirements.

One such requirement is aimed at federal agencies, ensuring the government’s digital presence is accessible to users with disabilities. Section 508, which is part of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, mandates that all electronic and information technology used by the federal government—including websites, social media, job application portals, and more—must be accessible to the 60 million people in the United States living with disabilities. In this post, Addteq partnered with Atlassian to explain how federal agencies can achieve Section 508 compliance.

3) Tips and Tricks to Establishing a Successful Telework Environment

As swaths of organizations in the United States are forced to shutter their workplaces in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, unprecedented numbers of employees are conducting business as usual—from the safety of their homes. Some states have placed restrictions on nonessential businesses, and many organizations—including government contractors—have taken the initiative to encourage employees to work from home. In this post, Carahsoft’s Adobe Product Specialist discusses tips and tricks to successfully establish a large scale Telework Environment during the beginning stages of the coronavirus pandemic in the Unites States.

4) Evolving Kubernetes into an Enterprise Container Platform

State agencies and academic institutions are increasingly challenged to keep up with the speed of innovation while meeting stakeholder demands and expectations. By turning to container-based services, organizations enable efficient, affordable application delivery and cloud migration. Kubernetes, an open source platform, is the industry standard in container orchestration technology, but managing and running “do it yourself” Kubernetes is easier said than done. In this post, Red Hat experts explain how organizations can use container-based services to enable efficient, affordable application delivery and cloud migration.

5) Start Your Agency Off on the Best Cybersecurity Foot With Federal Frameworks

According to the SolarWinds 2019 Federal Cybersecurity survey report, threats posed by careless and malicious insiders and foreign governments are at an all-time high. The report found 56% of federal government IT leaders surveyed considered careless or untrained insiders as the most significant threat to their organizations. Fifty-two percent said foreign governments are the primary menace to their agencies.

Despite this, federal agencies surveyed believe their ability to detect and prevent insider and malicious external threats has improved over the last year. Agencies attribute this confidence to updated federal regulations and mandates that give them the ability to better manage risk as part of their overall security posture. In this post, we spoke with SolarWinds about how agencies can effectively tailor their cybersecurity frameworks.

6) 3 Reasons Federal Healthcare Agencies Need Cloud Computing

It’s been six years since U.S. healthcare providers were required to integrate medical records into electronic systems under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Since then, newer mandates have continued to encourage digital data sharing and interoperability within healthcare organizations.

A natural next step in the digitization of healthcare records is storing that data in the cloud, where it can be securely accessed and updated by healthcare teams. Additionally, when paired with cutting-edge artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, cloud computing can offer data analysis that facilitates breakthroughs in medical research and patient care. In this post, Google Cloud talks 3 essential reasons that cloud computing can make a change in federal healthcare agencies.

7) How AI is Helping Government Agencies Deliver on their Missions

The Federal Data Strategy’s 2020 Action Plan released in December set the stage for how government agencies should prioritize data in the coming year. Since that time, many agencies have taken aggressive steps to turn their data holdings into strategic assets. One area of focus has been the increased adoption of AI and machine learning technologies. In my role, I work closely with the agencies and their data teams sitting on the front lines of this innovation. The early adopters who began their big data journey over the last few years are starting to see how data and predictive analytics can support their mission goals and create additional value for their stakeholders. In this post, Databricks walked us through examples of this implementation with teams across federal, state, and local agencies.

8) Creating Modern IDEA Compliant Citizen Experiences

Federal agencies are no longer expected to be just sources of information and services. They’re now tasked with providing digital experiences on par with those found on consumer sites. This starts with having a website compliant with the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act (IDEA). It also means incorporating useful content, a personalized experience, and data management that allows non-technical stakeholders to update and maintain the site. In this post, Liferay’s Kale Fluharty dives deep into how to create a government compliant citizen experience using DXP with USWDS 2.0.

9) How Facial Recognition Can Keep Flexible Workplaces Safe

As state and federal agencies begin exploring hybrid workplace models and planning on how to keep employees safe as the COVID pandemic continues to evolve, compliance is a critical piece of the puzzle. Office reopening plans are only as successful as their implementation, and government organizations must be able to ensure that whatever precautions they put into place—from requiring masks and social distancing to keeping remote or revolving workstations secure—are effective. In this post, piXlogic’s Joseph Santucci explains ways that facial recognition can improve workplace safety, especially during a COVID-era in which employee accountability is imperative.

10) Leaders In Innovation: Identity and Access Management

Agencies have been learning the importance of identity and access management for nearly two decades, but, like many technological evolutions, the coronavirus pandemic has encouraged adoption on an entirely new scale. As remote work became the norm, agencies adapted to use technology like smart identity cards in new ways, enabling capabilities like digital signatures. These new features are secured by the common access card (CAC) in the Department of Defense (DoD) or the Personal Identity Verification (PIV) card in the civilian environment, and all follow the principles and strategies of identity and access management. In this post, we summarized the full Leaders in Innovation report which discussed the benefits and challenges of identity and access management.

Though this year presented its challenges, such as many companies moving completely out of office due to a global pandemic, Government Technology has evolved to expand its capabilities. During this struggle, we’d like to thank all of our authors, contributors and readers for their support within our community. We’re pleased to continue growing our blog and expanding our content, and look forward to bringing you even more in 2021.

Thanks for checking out our top 10 Community Blog posts for 2020! Come back soon to read our upcoming series on public sector IT trends that will be mission critical in 2021 – we will be taking a deeper look into: Workflow Automation, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Cybersecurity and Multicloud Technology.

Making the Most of Content Discovery Software

Posted on by Joseph Santucci

Images and videos have long been key to critical workflows carried out by government and law enforcement organizations. The ability to detect, recognize, match, correlate, and understand what is in a picture or a video sequence are areas where automated software solutions can save time and improve quality.

By necessity, analysts and investigators need to be creative in their work, often generating and following leads from different angles and points of view. While “point solutions” such as facial recognition are available, more is needed to truly facilitate investigative work. What is required is software that integrates not only facial recognition but also objects recognition, text recognition, automatic labeling, visual search, and other related computer vision and AI technologies, all working together to provide a multifaceted view of the data.

Search and Discovery

Investigators, analysts, and knowledge-workers often have to make sense of and discover patterns in data that comes from many different sources. Bits of information from structured and unstructured data can then form the basis for actionable conclusions, strengthened by supporting evidence. When the data sources are from images and videos—whether archived or collected in real time—the user is often not sure of exactly what they are searching for or trying to discover. They are looking for patterns that lead to information that is pertinent to the task at hand, but it’s hard to know what information will be needed to identify those patterns.

In many cases, software automation tools on the market today focus on “matching” things, such as faces. Some extend the capability to cover “search,” such as matching a face but only under user-defined selective conditions. Even fewer tools support “discovery” functions—using other clues to help figure out which face the user should be interested in searching for and eventually matching to. All of these capabilities need to be packaged in a productive interface that lets users effectively communicate with the software to express their search intent. Further, the software is required to work at scale.

Data Types and Technologies

The ability to detect and recognize faces is a helpful feature in many use case applications. Capabilities of facial recognition technology have grown rapidly over the past few years, ranging from the ability to identify people in passports or access control situations to identification at scale or in more general settings, including, more recently, the ability to identify people wearing COVID-style face masks. Requirements continue to evolve, but there are at least some vendors that are pushing the state-of-the-art in this regard.

Recognizing objects within images or video has improved in recent years through the application of deep learning techniques. This technology is most successful when applied to generic classification tasks such as detecting the presence of a “cat,” a “person,” or a “car.” Unfortunately, the technique requires significant quantities of pre-labeled data, which can be expensive and time consuming to acquire, and in some use-cases may not be possible to obtain. Due to these and other technical reasons, commercial suppliers of object detection services on the web tend to limit their offerings to a few hundred common, recognizable object classes.

Many use-cases require higher levels of specificity, such as a search for a specific type of car, not just any car. This specificity requirement is important in the context of discovery. Further, the scope of things or objects that a user may be interested in is far greater than a few hundred or a few thousand, and often it is not possible to know beforehand what will be of interest. Visual search technologies are required to bridge the gap and support these use-cases. This capability lets users search for things that are seen but for which a name is not available, such as an image of a person whose face is completely obscured—visual search can still find useful information in the image, such as matches to the clothes the person is wearing. There are very few vendors that provide solutions in this space.

The ability to recognize a string of text that appears in the image is also crucial to the search and discovery process. Text can often add specificity to the formulation of a search query, such as searching for a car with a certain set of characters in the license plate. Text recognition and partial-string text search is often used together with other search module types.

An Integrated Package Approach

The integration of the above technologies in a productive user interface provides significant benefits to the work done by investigators and analysts. The goal is to let them discover more, faster, and more thoroughly. Integrating the capabilities means that in the same environment a user can operate on visual data from multiple points of view. Looking down the road, an integrated approach will enable new functionalities, including predictive analytics. These tools will let users identify patterns that would otherwise be exceedingly difficult for humans to spot, and thereby enable proactive responses.

Visit our website to learn more about an integrated content discovery software package.

How Facial Recognition Can Keep Flexible Workplaces Safe

Posted on by Joseph Santucci

One emerging solution employs facial recognition software to ensure that COVID-era guidelines are being followed. This low-budget solution takes advantage of existing cameras within the workspace and emerging facial recognition technology that distinguishes individual faces with and without masks, providing users with automated reports and insights on the safety of their workspaces.

Monitor mask compliance

Wearing masks in an office environment is one key to facilitate the safe return to in-person operations, but monitoring and compliance is critical to ensuring the policy is effective, especially in large government buildings. Establishing checkpoints is one way to demonstrate compliance, but that approach isn’t necessarily efficient or effective—it requires manned stations throughout the facility, and employees can still remove their masks once they’ve passed the checkpoint.

Instead, workplaces can turn to cutting-edge facial recognition software—which, in the time of COVID, has been adapted to recognize masks as objects and can differentiate individuals both with and without masks. This technology can extract valuable information from the video feeds of existing cameras and can operate around the clock without the need for additional personnel.

Such software enables users to compile reports on mask-wearing within the workplace, pinpoint areas or situations where employees are more likely to remove their masks, and identify individuals who repeatedly remove their face coverings. These insights allow organizations to shape and strengthen their mask-wearing policies and demonstrates compliance within the workplace.

Ensure social distancing

Another key COVID-era workplace policy is social distancing, which presents its own challenges in bustling hallways, conference rooms, and other communal areas. Proper distancing can be especially hard to enforce in situations where employees are moving about or passing through.

Software automation can be used to identify infractions and bottlenecks by analyzing the camera feeds for reoccurring instances of congregating. Workplaces can use this insight to pinpoint areas where social distancing is hard to maintain and implement changes to reduce bottlenecks or manage the number of people in one part of the facility.

Identify remote workers

While state and federal organizations are working towards bringing more of the workforce back into the office, flexible and remote work will continue to be critical for keeping employees safe and healthy. Most organizations have implemented telework policies including a VPN and secure authentication, but facial recognition software can ensure that only the authorized individual is sitting at the terminal for the duration of the session.

While a user is logged into a secure session, the software can use the computer’s camera to send regular images of the user to the server for automated monitoring. If the user steps away from the computer and there is no face detected in the images, the software can automatically terminate the session. Similarly, if the user steps away and another person takes their place, the software can identify the switch and end the session as well, ensuring that only the authorized user has access to the VPN.

Like many organizations, government agencies have had to pivot their operations to keep employees safe during COVID. As workplaces start figuring out how safely bring more employees back into the office, policies and compliance must work in tandem to reduce the spread of COVID as much as possible. Facial recognition software is an easy way to use existing infrastructure to assess just how safe the workplace is—whether it’s in office or remote—and adjust policies if needed.

Software company piXlogic has adapted its facial recognition technology to overcome the challenge of detecting masked faces and can identify individuals, with or without masks, at a high degree of reliability and accuracy. piXlogic has structured its software to seamlessly count masked and unmasked individuals and provide reports on compliance with COVID precautions within the workplace.

Learn more about how piXlogic is helping organizations return to work safely.

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