Cloud Computing

It is hard to tell whether federal data center consolidation efforts are actually saving taxpayers money. Why? To start, no one is tracking agency progress in closing data centers against the cost-savings goal, according to congressional lawmakers.

Gen. Keith Alexander reiterated his view that the federal government’s network architecture is not defensible against cyber-attacks, but added it can be if rebuilt using the latest cloud-computing technologies.

FedScoop’s 4th Annual Tech Shoot-Out, held May 7, 2013, at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., brought together government and industry IT leaders to “shoot it out” over the biggest questions related to federal cloud computing, cybersecurity and big data.

I’m often asked why cloud computing is seen as transformational. We readily acknowledge that the move from mainframe to client/server, the proliferation of personal computing, and the explosive growth of the Internet have fundamentally changed the way we interact with IT. In my opinion, the cloud has already affected a change of this magnitude, but many private and public sector organizations have been slow to understand its impact on their enterprise.

A look at the latest news regarding FedRAMP.

The federal information technology budget has remained effectively flat the past four years while government spending continues to be cut in different areas shows the Obama administration’s belief in the power of technology to be transformative.

The Defense Information Systems Agency recently achieved initial operating capability for its cloud brokerage system that will help the Defense Department and its components secure cloud-computing capabilities, the agency announced Tuesday.

Adrian Gardner, chief information officer at NASA Goddard, discusses what he’s working on in this interview with FedScoopTV.

Michelle Rudnicki, vice president of cloud computing and growth initiatives at IBM Federal, discusses modular development, cloud computing and government agility in this interview with FedScoopTV.

The U.S. Navy is moving forward with cloud computing and will not wait for the Defense Information Systems Agency to finish developing the Department of Defense’s Enterprise Cloud Service Broker platform.

Kathy Conrad, principal deputy associate administrator for the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies at the U.S. General Services Administration, discusses what she’s working on with FedScoopTV.

Steve Kenniston, global storage efficiency evangelist for IBM, discusses data, virtualization and cloud computing in this interview with FedScoopTV.

Theresa Grafenstine, the inspector general at the U.S. House of Representatives, is responsible for planning and leading independent, nonpartisan audits, advisories and investigations of the financial and administrative functions of the House, many of which deal with information technology.

With sequestration and looming budget cuts, it’s hard to know what the future of federal government IT will look like.

In an interview with FedScoop, Brockett said he’s been pushing to change the IT culture at NIST in the two and a half years since becoming CIO, aiming to give its world class scientists a world class IT organization.

The Department of Defense reached a milestone on Tuesday when the one-millionth user was added to the department’s enterprise email system, making it one of the largest independent email systems in the world.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection Chief Technology Officer Wolf Tombe sat down with FedScoopTV to discuss the agency’s approach to open source software, trends, predictions and advice to other government agencies.

Under a four-year contract, Lockheed Martin transitioned more than 22,000 EPA email users to Office 365 for Government, a service that stores U.S. government data in a segregated community cloud and includes email, calendars, scheduling and collaboration tools for internal and external use.

The U.S. General Services Administration will stop accepting new and re-submitted applications for organizations applying to become Third Party Assessment Organizations for the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program on March 25.

In the past month, the U.S. General Services Administration’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies has released a set of baseline social media metrics for the federal government, a social media application programming interface and is looking into privatizing parts of FedRAMP.