Twitter Feed
The Endpoint Imperative: Global Security Compliance. Are you ready?
China has its Cybersecurity Law. Next May, the General Data Protection Regulation – or GDPR –goes into effect for the European Union. Research shows most organizations just aren’t…
The Endpoint Imperative: IT Spending: Setting Priorities in a Volatile World
Fast-evolving trends are changing the way IT thinks about security. To stay secure and productive, IT operations must excel at the fundamentals: PC refreshes for security, and optimizing end-user…
Top 1000 Tech Bloggers
The Rise “Top 1000 Tech Bloggers” leaderboard recognizes the most inspiring Tech journalists and bloggers active on social media. They use Klout scores (50%) and the blogger’s twitter conversations on…
IBM – The Power of Cloud Brokerage
Hybrid cloud adoption is now mainstream and you are making decisions every day about how to transform application and infrastructure architectures, service delivery, DevOps, production operations and governance. With Cloud…
More SMB Love Needed
In a recent post, titled “10 Surprising Facts About Cloud Computing and What It Really Is”, Zac Johnson highlighted some interesting facts about cloud computing in the SMB…
ATMs Are IT Too!
That world of homogenous IT technology managed entirely by the internal IT organization has long disappeared. Operations today require efficient and global management of technologically heterogeneous environments. The challenges and…
Digital Transformation Asset Management
Today’s businesses run in the virtual world. From virtual machines to chatbots to Bitcoin, physical has become last century’s modus operandi. Dealing with this type of change in business even…
The Game of Clouds 2017
The AWS Marketplace is growing at breakneck speed, with 40% more listings than last year! This and more insights were revealed when CloudEndure used their custom tool to quickly scan the…
Managing Your Hybrid Cloud
Photo credit: Shutterstock Runaway cloud computing cost may be causing an information technology industry crisis. Expanding requirements, extended transition schedules and misleading marketplace hype have made “Transformation” a dirty word. …
American Airlines Adopts Public Cloud Computing
Did you know that the reservations systems of the biggest carriers mostly run on a specialized IBM operating system known as Transaction Processing Facility (TPF). Designed by IBM in the…
A couple of weeks ago, I was offered a chance to meet Mr. Vivek Kundra at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in downtown Washington, DC. Needless to say, I was honored to be given the opportunity. Although I was clear on my own views of how the Federal government could use cloud computing, the Obama administration’s plans were, at that time, anything but certain. What a difference a week makes !!
As has been widely reported, the President’s 2010 Budget submission has firmly set cloud computing as a “key tool for improving innovation, efficiency and effectiveness in Federal IT. The GSA has emphasized this edict by releasing a request for information (RFI) for Infrastructure as a Service offerings. This rapid and fairly decisive course change to the way Federal IT will be procured in the future can potentially change an entire industry. Looking at what has happened in the financial and automotive industries, this could also be seen as the administration flexing its muscle yet again in order to set the direction of a crucial component of the US economic system.
So now, with a little over a week before my meeting with Mr. Kundra, what do I talk about? Since the administrations direction has now been set, there’s clearly no need to discuss cloud computing as the right direction for Federal IT. Not being a political pundit or economic advisor, I will definitely stay away from the debates around government influence over the commercial sector. So as a technologist, I will stick to my knitting and discuss what technologies the coming GovCloud implementation will be able to leverage going forward.
If you have any suggestions for me, I would be happy to hear about them. The only thing I ask is for your recommendations to be focused on general technologies, industry standards or open source approaches. Please, no specific commercial products or specific technology implementations.
Of particular interest to me will be those technologies, standards or approaches that are “shovel ready”, and available for pilot implementations today! As outlined in the budget, “… pilot projects will be implemented to offer an opportunity to utilize more fully and broadly departmental and agency architectures to identify enterprise-wide common services and solutions, with a new emphasis on cloud-computing. The pilots will test a variety of services and delivery modes, provisioning approaches, options, and opportunities that cloud computing brings to Federal Government. Additionally, the multiple approaches will focus on measuring service, cost, and performance; refining and scaling pilots to full capabilities; and providing financial support to accelerate migration”.
I look forward to your assistance on this!
Kevin Jackson
[email protected]
3 Comments
Cloud Computing
- CPUcoin Expands CPU/GPU Power Sharing with Cudo Ventures Enterprise Network Partnership
- CPUcoin Expands CPU/GPU Power Sharing with Cudo Ventures Enterprise Network Partnership
- Route1 Announces Q2 2019 Financial Results
- CPUcoin Expands CPU/GPU Power Sharing with Cudo Ventures Enterprise Network Partnership
- ChannelAdvisor to Present at the D.A. Davidson 18th Annual Technology Conference
Cybersecurity
- Route1 Announces Q2 2019 Financial Results
- FIRST US BANCSHARES, INC. DECLARES CASH DIVIDEND
- Business Continuity Management Planning Solution Market is Expected to Grow ~ US$ 1.6 Bn by the end of 2029 - PMR
- Atos delivers Quantum-Learning-as-a-Service to Xofia to enable artificial intelligence solutions
- New Ares IoT Botnet discovered on Android OS based Set-Top Boxes
Kevin – good luck with the meeting. I like your idea of crowd-sourcing suggestions for the meeting! Others will likely have more valuable ideas than mine, so let me just suggest a little thing I’d like Vivek to keep in mind as a guiding principle for open government: Choice.
What do I mean? Government agencies, as they modernize to approach the agility and performance of great commercial IT shops, will be looking to cloud-solution (and other) providers for “business value and choice in a mixed-source world,” in the words of Microsoft’s Teresa Carlson. The agency CIOs and CTOs whom Vivek leads need the flexibility to choose the best tools to accomplish their mission regardless of platform. I’d hate to see a “one-size-fits-all” prescribed solution (even if it were based on Microsoft products!), and I think we’ll all benefit from a balanced approach with appropriate choice and flexibility reserved for smart CIOs.
Good luck and I’m looking forward to reading your report of the meeting! -lewis
Thank you very much for your comments. I agree with your thoughts and personally think that cloud portability will be a huge challenge.
Kevin, that is an awesome opportunity to be able to be part of shaping the future of IT for our Govt. This obviously comes with some great responsibility as well.
I think in order for the govt to adopt such a broad technology there needs to be standards set for interoperability and security first. We all know that standards boards tend to lag behind real world implementations. But in this case the consequences of not going forward with agreed upon security and interop standards is very dangerous.
What has worked with other technologies is lighting a torch underneath the vendors to get together and provide a set of standards before any govt contracts are let. Sometimes providing that carrot (big carrot) is essential to get everyone in the same room. Good luck with your meeting, very cool!