Government IT & Cloud Computing: Themes for Discussion
I will definitely highlight this dialog and will also leave a listing of all comments for Mr. Kundra's review
By: Kevin Jackson
Jun. 19, 2009 01:15 PM
A little over a week ago I put out a request to my readers to help me with my meeting with Vivek Kundra. The response has been awesome!Thank you for your suggestions and recommendations, both public and private. Below, in purely random order, are just some of the comments I've received. If you want to add your voice to the choir, I'll be taking comments through Tuesday evening, May 26th. During my meeting, I will definitely highlight this dialog and will also leave a listing of all comments for Mr. Kundra's review.
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.
Jason Matthew McNutt:
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!
AJ Malik:
I believe a frank discussion on open source initiatives, with respect to Grid Computing, will be productive. For example, the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA), a product of the Grid community at large, represents an evolution towards a Grid system architecture based on Web services concepts and technologies. Furthermore, Data Access and Integration Services (DAIS) is another emerging standard (e.g. WS-DAIR, WS-DAIX) to access and integrate data, within a grid environment, that could drive a unified federated data architecture. All have limited implementations, but are "shovel ready."
Pollock:
Does he plan to provide additional mandates related to IPv6 - will he take the next step?
Is there a Federal Wide Cloud computing strategy to optimize and outsource government run IT shops.
Does he plan to implement BAA compliance in addition to TAA compliance for IT monies in the stimulus package? (at the fed level)
Any plans to align government with industry best practices to improve service delivery to the public? Agencies should be creating a roadmap for the network infrastructure that will allow them to rapidly deploy new applications to improve business processes and provide quality public services.
Does each agency have a network infrastructure that is capable of handling the applications needed to improve operational efficiency anywhere, anytime, anyplace in support of the mission? This is job number one, every agency must have an agile mission fabric, none of the other things that follow will work well without it.
Who is best to provide oversight, implementation, and ongoing maintenance for a given application? We should always be asking the WHO question, modeling industry, and avoiding business as usual.
Alex Stobart:
From the UK there are some open source business processes designed and operating between citizen and government. The main issue with most of our ICT in government is that hitherto procurement has been proprietary ( Oracle ; Microsoft ; EDS ), expensive and completely un-scalable. Each agency has bought its own set.
A NGO called mysociety did most of the open source, rich content and user-friendly work http://www.mysociety.org/
There is a petitions site to the Prime Minister which has had over 9 million votes
There is a fantastic process to write to your elected representative ( local, state , federal ) http://www.writetothem.com/
There is a method to report any issue to your local government ( poor street lighting ; graffiti etc.) http://www.fixmystreet.com/
These are all shovel ready and would be immediately transferable to the USA
The other process that you might wish to replicate, or suggest, involves re-coding government data. It was called the Re-Wired State, and a list of projects is here - http://rewiredstate.org/projects
The projects listed demonstrate the intent. How successful you can be will depend on how much data the government lets go.
Other suggestions - facebook for jobs ( after all it is just a market with bids and offers ) ;
You won't manage to have comparable financials across agencies until you have a standardised General Ledger ( something the health service in UK has battled with since 1948 )
Sun's star office suite never took off ; in the UK not many people use pbwiki in government but it seems really successful and ning we use a lot. We are looking at how mental health service users might create ning groups to exchange content, information and collaborate. Their carers or families could also be involved, as eventually might employers and state agencies. To start with, it is the service users only as they are the most motivated to help one another.
Andrew H. LaVanway:
If only the problems here were technology problems. This model has been called a lot of different things over the last decade, but it always seems to fail at SLAs, security, and the unwillingness of leadership to give up their own IT infrastructures. If the PM office tackles just the first two, it will be major progress but still a little short of the change that needs to happen.
Now might be just the right time for a mandate - the business case here is off the charts.
Adam Arthur:
I don't understand why they can't arrange the data to "scatter" across the cloud. If someone hacked into one node, they would only get a "piece" of the information. You would have to be given admin permissions to accurately "piece" the whole picture together. We are doing this with the public health grid at the NCPHI lab at CDC. Seems pretty safe to me.
Guy Martin:
I'd suggest you take a look at what DISA has done with the RACE (Rapid Access Computing Environment) effort they are bringing online, as well as its companion application development environment (http://disa.mil/forge).
While these are specific examples, I think you'll find interesting information to help you in your meeting with Mr. Kundra. DISA has already been thinking a lot about this already.
Ari Herzog:
[Does Mr. Kundra think] the goal should be to build and adopt new technological standards to gain efficiency/effectiveness or to amend current infrastructure and rewrite policies so such technologies have an easier chance of adoption.
[W]here does he stand on the notion of a "one web" solution for the entire executive branch, i.e. instead of individual departments acting like silos with their own social technologies, shouldn't there be an Administration-wide direction and initiative in one?
Deb Lavoy:
[H]ow about working on giving more support to adoption of collaborative and social media tools within the agencies - encouraging the technical, legal and cultural issues that agencies need to get over.
Susan Clizbe:
I would second Ms. [Deb] Lavoy, and add what to me is almost embarrassingly basic: an immediate solution to the ban on thumb drives. Perhaps the ban itself can't be resolved that quickly, but surely there is some way to train and trust people who truly need this technology to do their jobs every day. We in Public Affairs are hampered by the inability to move photos from camera to computer, and I have read about med techs with handheld computers in the field whose issue is not just job-critical but life-critical to their patients.
Savitha Manohar:
Driving innovation and standardization with a view to improving efficiency is a lofty goal. But change is painful- especially for the folks that have to practice this in their work everyday. Compliance can be enforced, but in order to ensure that folks understand the strategy and are committed to realizing the efficiencies, the human component has to be taken into account. It is challenging to change a culture where every agency/department is used to following their own standards to have to now start adhering to a new centralized standard. Pilot initiatives have to go beyond the notion of "one size fits all". Will there be plans to make sure that the resources that have to use this are on board?
Khürt:
There is more to securing "cloud computing" than a bunch of policies and directives. What is your disaster recovery and continuity plan for when the cloud service suffers a failure? Since the data lives in the "cloud", can you be assured that you know "where" it it? I guess the answers depend on your definition of "cloud".
( Thank you. If you enjoyed this article, get free updates by email or RSS - KLJ )
About Kevin Jackson Kevin Jackson is currently an Engineering Fellow with NJVC, one of the largest information technology solutions providers supporting the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). Prior to this position, he served in various senior management positions including VP, Dataline LLC, Director Federal for Sirius Computer Solutions and Worldwide Sales Executive for IBM. His formal education includes MSEE (Computer Engineering), MA National Security & Strategic Studies and a BS Aerospace Engineering. Jackson graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1979 and retired from the US Navy earning specialties in Space Systems Engineering, Airborne Logistics and Airborne Command and Control. He also served with the National Reconnaissance Office, Operational Support Office, providing tactical support to Navy and Marine Corps forces worldwide. Kevin is the founder and author of “Cloud Musings”, a widely followed blog that focuses on the use of cloud computing by the Federal government. He is also the editor and founder of “Government Cloud Computing” electronic magazine, published at Ulitzer.com.
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Kevin L Jackson launched the "Government Cloud Computing Journal" on Ulitzer.
The online magazine offers stories and articles on the effective use of cloud
computing technologies within the government domain.
Kevin L. Jackson is a senior information technologist specializing in
information technology solutions that meet critical Federal government
operational requirements. Currently, he serves as Director, Business
Development for Dataline, Inc., and editor of Government Cloud Computing
e-zine.
Kevin L. Jackson (right) with Cloud Computing Expo conference chair Jeremy
Geelan before his presentation on Government Cloud Computing.
About Ulitzer.com
Initiating content coverage on any topic or launching a magazine at
Ulitzer.com is designed to be as easy as boiling an egg and doesn't take
much longer. To become a Ulitzer author, anyone can fill out a simple author
prof... (more)
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By Jeremy Geelan
"New infrastructure and operations technologies such as cloud services and virtualization ... were selected by CIOs the most often and are the top-two technologies for 2011," said Mark McDonald, group vice president and head of research for Gartner Executive Programs, as the results were announced of the 2011 CIO Agenda survey by Gartner Executive Programs (EXP).
The worldwide CIO survey was conducted by Gartner EXP from September to December 2010 and represents CIO budget plans reported at that time. According to the results, CIOs expect to adopt new cloud services much faster than originally expected. Currently, 3% of CIOs have the majority of IT running in the cloud or on SaaS technologies, but over the next four years CIOs expect this number to increase to 43%.
Reads: 13,819
Cloud Expo, Inc. Registers Worldwide Cloud Expo (TM) Trademark
By Roger Strukhoff
Cloud Expo, Cloud Expo East, Cloud Expo West, Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, Cloud Expo Europe, Cloud Expo Tokyo, Cloud Expo Prague, Cloud Expo Hong Kong, Cloud Expo Sao Paolo are trademarks and /or registered trademarks (USPTO serial number 85009040) of Cloud Expo, Inc.
Reads: 10,858
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SYS-CON's Cloud Expo, held each year in California, New York, Prague, Tokyo, and Hong Kong is the world’s leading Cloud event in its 4th year, larger than all other Cloud events put together. For sponsorship, exhibit opportunites and show prospectus, please contact Carmen Gonzalez, carmen (at) sys-con.com.
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Who Should Attend?
Senior Technologists including CIOs, CTOs, VPs of technology, IT directors and managers, network and storage managers, network engineers, enterprise architects, communications and networking specialists, directors of infrastructure Business Executives including CEOs, CMOs, CIOs, presidents, VPs, directors, business development; product and purchasing managers.
Big Data has caught the fancy of each and everyone. Consumer and enterprise world is looking to adopt the Big Data. Analysts are talking about it, proclaiming it to the next big thing!
We will start seeing SaaS vendors that will start offering data analytics as a service (e.g., 1010data). These ve...
Jan. 26, 2012 06:30 AM EST Reads: 1,134
The API Is the Center of the Application (Integration) Universe
By Lori MacVittie
Some have tried to distinguish between “mobile cloud” and “cloud” by claiming the former is the use of the web browser on a mobile device to access services while the latter uses device-native applications. Like all things cloud, the marketing fluff is purposefully obfuscating and sweeping under the...
"It is what is on the inside that counts." How many times have we all been told that? Personally, I can't even remember. However, just because it is perhaps overused and undoubtedly cliché, does not make it any less true. In fact, I rank it right up there with the golden rule as mantras that one sho...
Jan. 24, 2012 08:15 AM EST Reads: 950
Government Cloud Hubs – Shared Services Cloud Architecture
By Cloud Ventures
The previous blog talked about Municipalities beginning to move into a mode where they not only buy in Cloud services, but they also become a seller of them too. Research analyst IDC calls these ‘Cloud Hubs’ in new insights they are revealing about how this effect is already occuring in ...
Jan. 24, 2012 07:30 AM EST Reads: 953
Have You Tried SQL Azure?
By Jayaram Krishnaswamy
It has been out for quite some time. If you have not tried, perhaps you should. If you already know SQL Server you are already knowing a lot. It is time to pick up and move.
Microsoft has come out with this 'How to use SQL Azure' which will put you on the right track. Well after getting on the trac...
Jan. 24, 2012 12:33 AM EST Reads: 299
Cloudy Implications and Recommendations in Megaupload Seizure
By John Treadway
The FBI seized popular upload site Megaupload.com yesterday. They took the site down and now own the servers.
I am not an attorney, and I have no opinion on whether or not the MegaUpload guys were breaking laws or encouraging users to violate copyrights through illegal uploading and streaming of m...
Jan. 23, 2012 12:00 PM EST Reads: 850
PaaSing Comments – Data and PaaS
By John Treadway
I’ve been looking at the PaaS space for some time now. I spent some time with the good folks at CloudBees (naturally), and have had many conversations on CloudFoundry, Azure, and more with vendors, customers and other cloudy folks.
Krishnan posted a very good article over on CloudAve, and at one l...
Jan. 23, 2012 11:45 AM EST Reads: 724
The Fundamental Problem with Traditional Inbound Protection
By Lori MacVittie
The past year brought us many stories focusing on successful attacks on organizations for a wide variety of reasons. Why an organization was targeted was not nearly as important as the result: failure to prevent an outage. While the volume of traffic often seen by these organizations was in itself i...
Jan. 23, 2012 11:00 AM EST Reads: 679
Cloud Computing Insurance? Lots of Ways to Look at It
By Brian Gracely
A couple weeks ago there was an interesting discussion on Twitter amongst the #clouderati about ways to manage risk in a public cloud environment. I believe it was a fragment off the discussion that James Urquhart (@jamesurquhart) started about how "Cloud is complex" and one from Alistair Croll (@ac...
To build and maintain applications required to reach out to you customer through Mobile & Smart phone is expensive.
Why? Because of platform proliferation. Because of quick technology obsolescence. (See this)
Management perception compounds the problem.
Anybody, not intimately familiar with this...
Jan. 23, 2012 09:45 AM EST Reads: 2,020
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Past SYS-CON Events
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GovIT Expo govitexpo.com
Cloud Expo Europe cloudexpoeurope2009.sys-con.com
Cloud Expo 2010 Allstar Conference Faculty
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What The Enterprise IT World Says About Cloud Expo
"We had extremely positive feedback from both customers and prospects that attended the show and saw live demos of NaviSite's enterprise cloud based services."
A little over a week ago I put out a request to my readers to help me with my meeting with Vivek Kundra. The response has been awesome!Thank you for your suggestions and recommendations, both public and private. Below, in purely random order, are just some of the comments I've received. If you want to add your voice to the choir, I'll be taking comments through Tuesday evening, May 26th. During my meeting, I will definitely highlight this dialog and will also leave a listing of all comments for Mr. Kundra's review.
Cloud computing has gained momentum and is increasingly being embraced by enterprises of all sizes for application delivery. But the cloud itself is often its own worst enemy as performance, reliability, and the lack of enterprise level capabilities have led to obstacles in growth and adoption of this still promising infrastructure methodology. This is only exacerbated by an increasingly mobile and global world, one that is plagued with security concerns.
In his Day 3 Keynote at the 9th International Cloud Expo, Willie M. Tejada, Senior Vice President & General Manager of the Enterprise Cloud Division at Akamai, discussed what Akamai is doing to solve the challenges you face in the cloud, and how Akamai's Intelligent platform can help you leverage both public and hybrid cloud infrastructures without sacrificing security or control.
Motorola Mobility and its puppet master Google are going to try to get the iPhone 4S and iCloud enjoined in the United States.
The pair moved on the very day that Apple hit the ball so far out of the park they’re still looking for it after it announced it sold a record 37 million iPhones last quarter, described iCloud as the “strategy for the next decade, not a product,” and was lauded as the most valuable property on earth. 
Red Hat technology powers the world’s largest and most successful clouds. We have seen firsthand how to make cloud work for businesses and government organizations, both large and small. Companies are looking to cloud computing as a way to fundamentally change the economics of information technology and the agility of their enterprise.
In his general session at the 9th International Cloud Expo, Vijay Sarathy, Director of the Cloud Business Unit at Red Hat, discussed how Red Hat helps transform IT service delivery, build production infrastructure and applications in the cloud where new levels of openness, interoperability and flexibility can be realized.
I've been working on Enterprise Cloud Strategy and in the course of this work identified some interesting and non-obvious opportunities in the Cloud.
One solution I’ve examined is the well-crafted solution that is enStratus. enStratus has built a SaaS Cloud Management / Governance product focused on providing critical management, monitoring, governance capabilities tailored to the needs of the Global 2000 market, rather than the startup market. As I have worked with a current Fortune 500 client to identify Cloud solution components, my assessment is that enStratus is uncannily well designed for the enterprise market. Yet as a result of working with the enStratus team and product I found not just a management tool, but also a deeply insightful perspective as to the how and what of the Cloud.
Implementing a successful Enterprise Cloud requires that the needs of all stakeholders be balanced and in harmony. Without this balance, it simply doesn't work, leading to failed projects - as a number of early cloud adopters have already discovered to their cost. Balance is not just about consultation, it's about selecting technology that works to address the needs of each stakeholder.
In his Day 2 Keynote at the 9th International Cloud Expo, Pete Malcolm, CEO of Abiquo, demonstrated that not only is balance possible, but that with it, the Enterprise Cloud actually becomes greater than the sum of its parts, truly achieving both the individual goals of each stakeholder, and the collective goal of the organization.
For enterprise class cloud services, companies need a broad, comprehensive and flexible platform for their applications. Oracle recently announced the Oracle Public Cloud, which offers a broad set of best-in-class, integrated services that are elastic, secure and manageable, offering organizations choice in development and deployment of business critical applications.
In his opening keynote at the 9th International Cloud Expo, Tyler Jewell, VP, Product Management & Strategy, Oracle Public Cloud, discussed how the new services can speed your application development and deployment time, while maintaining a low cost infrastructure and the ease with which you can access, use and manage them.
Intel is buying QLogic’s InfiniBand operation for its supercomputer clustering charms.
The semiconductor giant is spending $125 million cash on the product line and certain unidentified assets and expects to hire a “significant” number of QLogic people to enhance its networking portfolio, provide a scalable HPC fabric technology, and support Intel’s goal of innovating on fabric architectures to achieve ExaFLOP/s performance by 2018.
ExaFLOP/s is a quintillion computer operations per second, a hundred times faster than today’s supercomputers. In 2019 the top 100 supercomputers are expected to absorb eight million high-margin processors, up from a projected one million in 2013.
Abiquo on Tuesday announced that its award-winning solution was selected by Claranet to power its recently announced Virtual Data Centre offering. Claranet’s Virtual Data Centre is an integrated Infrastructure as a Service offering available to the European market. Combining the provision of network and compute resources, it offers a new way of managing infrastructure to Claranet’s customers, addressing the key proposition of cloud deployments: the ability to control costs, scalability and speed of implementation.
Pete Malcolm, Abiquo CEO, noted that “Claranet is a great example of how Managed Service Providers use our technology to build sophisticated, self-managed cloud solutions for their customers.” 
Regulation of consumer and corporate data is increasing in response to the growing movement into cloud service offerings. Coupled with high-profile intrusions by groups such as Anonymous and Lulzsec, the necessity for a standard way to assess the security of cloud service providers becomes apparent.
CloudAudit is an open standard developed by a Cloud Security Alliance working group that provides an open, common, extensible namespace and interface to enable cloud providers and authorized customers to automate audits, assertions, assessments and assurance for their cloud infrastructure, platform or application environments. 
Virtualization Review today announced that cloud client computing products from Wyse Technology have been named Winner and Preferred Products in the 2012 Virtualization Review Readers Choice Awards. Wyse Z90 is Winner in the Thin/Zero Client Computing category, and Wyse Xenith Pro was named Preferred Product. This is the second year in a row that Wyse has received recognition as the winning product in the thin and zero client computing category. Wyse PocketCloud also was named as a Preferred Product in the Virtual PC category. The 2012 Winner and Preferred Product awards are presented to vendors in 14 different categories of products, ranging from desktop and storage virtualization to application virtualization and cloud computing solutions.
fast-moving industry discussion panel at the 9th International Cloud Expo at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, November 7-10, Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan was joined by Dr. Rich Wolski, CTO and Co-founder of Eucalyptus Systems Inc.; Sheng Liang, CTO Cloud Platforms Group, Citrix Systems; Rick Nucci, Co-Founder and CTO of Dell Boomi; Paulo Rosado, Founder & CEO of OutSystems; Jeff Hobbs, VP Engineering, ActiveState; Brian Lillie, CIO at Equinix; and Vineet Tyagi, ...
The first generation of cloud computing focused primarily on low-cost personal cloud services along with some capability for application developers and non-mission–critical applications. The latest generation of cloud computing is now capable of addressing the needs of enterprise mission-crucial applications. Mission-critical applications of the enterprise require computing infrastructure that is secure, optimizes performance and is highly resilient.
In his general session at the 9th Internati...
As enterprise adoption of cloud computing accelerates, organizations must have a strategy and plan for moving to the cloud. What should you put into public clouds? Should you create a private cloud? Should you use cloud applications, platform or infrastructure? How should organizations get started on the road to cloud computing?
In his general session at the 9th International Cloud Expo, Rex Wang, Vice President of Product Marketing at Oracle, explored best practices for how organizations can ...
2011 was a year of rapid adoption for public and private cloud services. Instant and on-demand server provisioning was the driving force behind the massive growth. On top, cloud server templates and script automation simplified application installation for simple and pre-defined application stacks, but have not targeted more complex enterprise application environments.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, John Yung, CEO of Appcara, will discuss how 2012 will be the year for app...
Big Data has caught the fancy of each and everyone. Consumer and enterprise world is looking to adopt the Big Data. Analysts are talking about it, proclaiming it to the next big thing!
We will start seeing SaaS vendors that will start offering data analytics as a service (e.g., 1010data). These ve...
Some have tried to distinguish between “mobile cloud” and “cloud” by claiming the former is the use of the web browser on a mobile device to access services while the latter uses device-native applications. Like all things cloud, the marketing fluff is purposefully obfuscating and sweeping under the...
"It is what is on the inside that counts." How many times have we all been told that? Personally, I can't even remember. However, just because it is perhaps overused and undoubtedly cliché, does not make it any less true. In fact, I rank it right up there with the golden rule as mantras that one sho...
The previous blog talked about Municipalities beginning to move into a mode where they not only buy in Cloud services, but they also become a seller of them too. Research analyst IDC calls these ‘Cloud Hubs’ in new insights they are revealing about how this effect is already occuring in ...
It has been out for quite some time. If you have not tried, perhaps you should. If you already know SQL Server you are already knowing a lot. It is time to pick up and move.
Microsoft has come out with this 'How to use SQL Azure' which will put you on the right track. Well after getting on the trac...
The FBI seized popular upload site Megaupload.com yesterday. They took the site down and now own the servers.
I am not an attorney, and I have no opinion on whether or not the MegaUpload guys were breaking laws or encouraging users to violate copyrights through illegal uploading and streaming of m...
I’ve been looking at the PaaS space for some time now. I spent some time with the good folks at CloudBees (naturally), and have had many conversations on CloudFoundry, Azure, and more with vendors, customers and other cloudy folks.
Krishnan posted a very good article over on CloudAve, and at one l...
The past year brought us many stories focusing on successful attacks on organizations for a wide variety of reasons. Why an organization was targeted was not nearly as important as the result: failure to prevent an outage. While the volume of traffic often seen by these organizations was in itself i...
A couple weeks ago there was an interesting discussion on Twitter amongst the #clouderati about ways to manage risk in a public cloud environment. I believe it was a fragment off the discussion that James Urquhart (@jamesurquhart) started about how "Cloud is complex" and one from Alistair Croll (@ac...
To build and maintain applications required to reach out to you customer through Mobile & Smart phone is expensive.
Why? Because of platform proliferation. Because of quick technology obsolescence. (See this)
Management perception compounds the problem.
Anybody, not intimately familiar with this...
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