Is cloud computing really a great hope for federal government IT, or a lot of empty promises?
My pal Peter Schooff just published an interesting post and podcast with Tarak Modi, vice president and CTO of CALIBRE
Systems, on the prospects for cloud computing inside the beltway. And he seems very hopeful.
The idea that federal managers can share applications built and run by somebody else at possibly a fraction of the cost has a lot of appeal up and down and around the government. And private cloud can take away many of the security concerns.
Modi reports he is seeing adoption in the federal space pick up,
especially in terms of private cloud implementations -- which don't
carry security concerns. There's NASA's Nebula, and another example
includes DoD's RACE Program, started by the Defense Information Systems
Agency, or DISA in October 2008.
Both efforts are private clouds, Modi explains, The Nebula program is currently a private cloud, but eventually may evolve to a hybrid cloud to enable greater collaboration with the academic community and the public. The DoD RACE program is "managed completed within the existing DoD data centers and operates only on the DoD's internal network."
Another important development is FedRAMP, which "provides a unified government wide risk management framework that enables centralized security management of cloud computing for federal agencies," says Modi. Also, the General Services Administration or GSA has reissued its blanket purchase agreement or BPA for procuring infrastructure-as-a-service cloud computing services, which puts a greater onus on vendors to provide better security. The GSA program integrates with FedRAMP, to the point where FedRAMP certification is a must for vendors selling solutions to the federal government.
Leave a comment