I’m at a State Department conference at Georgetown U about real-time data. I’m unfortunately going to have to miss a chunk of the afternoon due to another obligation.) NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness...

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 alread...

In recent discussions with IT leaders from both federal and Department of Defense sides of US government, representatives stated that they are having a heck of a time accommodating expansive growth in mobile computing. This is critical given that today, in most cases, agencies and depa...

We’ve recently heard a few big announcements for mobile computing in the military, which has long been blocked by security issues. First, the US Defense Information Systems Agency approved Dell Android 2.2 for use on Department of Defense networks with a few notable limitations. DoD us...

The Navy Marine Corps Intranet is the largest individual network in the world. The only larger network is the Internet. This huge network sprawl requires a great deal of strategy, concern and planning. Over 700,000 users rely on the intranet to receive IT services. This is a huge netwo...

Over the past years, government cloud computing has steadily moved forward from it's early beginnings as an interesting curiosity. Since Sunday's broadcast, I've been asked numerous times about my real answer to the question "Will 'Cloud Computing' Work In White House". Although I wou...

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been in the Big Data business since 1999 when it launched the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), the world’s largest biometric database on individuals. IAFIS contains over 55 million sets of fingerprints and is used ...

The Government Big Data Solutions Award was established to highlight innovative solutions and facilitate the exchange of best practices, lessons learned and creative ideas for addressing Big Data challenges. The top five nominees and overall winner was announced at Hadoop World in New ...

The National Cloud Technologist Association is bringing the CloudMASTER & CloudGURU certification classes to the Washington Metropolitan Area in 2012. First introduced in November at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) in Newark, this continuing education program provides a s...

It gives me great pleasure to announce the relaunch of GovCloud.com! GovCoud is the “go to” place for everything related to federal cloud computing. Our mission is to help federal organizations learn about, try and securely adopt cloud computing technologies. In full alignment with The...

One of the key topics for our Shared Services Canada webinar will be ‘Government PaaS’, referring to Platform as a Service. Recently I have been interviewing senior executives in large enterprises adopting Enterprise Cloud Computing (see our intro white paper here), and PaaS is one of...

NJVC®, one of the largest information technology solutions providers supporting the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), is pleased to announce that Kevin Jackson, general manager, cloud services, will participate in the “Security Assumption Buster Panel” during the National Institute of...

One of the headline ‘R&D Working Groups‘ we’re starting up as part of our Canadian Cloud Best Practices program is ‘Federal Government Cloud’. As the name suggests this is a best practices program that will define how a Federal Government can implement a Cloud Computing strategy. Th...

Cloud computing, a new approach in the provisioning and consumption of IT, has been described as a means to cut federal IT budgets. This panel of esteemed intelligence community technologists will discuss the implementation of cloud solutions (private, public, community and hybrid) fro...

The adoption of cloud computing goes beyond cutting costs or transforming fixed costs into variable costs. Cloud is a powerful innovation and business transformation platform to increase productivity and competitiveness by supporting improved services and new business and service model...

NJVC®, one of the largest information technology solutions providers supporting the Department of Defense, announces its lineup for the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo®, Oct. 16 - 20 at the Walt Disney World Dolphin Hotel in Orlando, Fla. Visit the NJVC booth (#206) on the tradeshow floor to ...

As of yet, there is no definitive narrative of the virus that hit the U.S. drone fleet at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada this September. Original reports stated that drone cockpits had been infected with a keylogger virus and, while there was no indication that classified information ...

NJVC, one of the largest information technology solutions (IT) providers supporting the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), is pleased to offer live, compelling demonstrations on the company’s Streamlined NJVC Automation Products, Services and Solutions™ (SNAPSS™) at GEOINT 2011 Symposiu...

This afternoon I had a very interesting discussion with Mr. Jeffrey Kaplan, Managing Director of THINKstrategies and founder of the Cloud Computing Showplace. His firm is focused entirely on the business implications of the transition of the technology industry from product-centric to ...

Cloud computing, as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is a model for enabling “… convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly pr...

The defense and intelligence communities are not immune to cloud computing. Arguably more than any other government agencies, their missions require a fabric of utility computing that scales on demand and enables self discovery and self-service access to secure, timely and relevant inf...

While the benefits and value of the federal cloud computing policy can be debated, the world’s transition to cloud computing as an integral component of any IT infrastructure cannot be denied. The prudent government executive should, therefore, heed the lessons learned from the many pr...

(This is part 2 of the series entitled "Implementation of Cloud Computing Solutions in Federal Agencies" that first appeared on Forbes.com. This series provides the content of a whitepaper I recently authored. A copy of the complete whitepaper will be available at NJVC.com starting Sep...

Cloud computing is a new approach in the provisioning and consumption of information technology (IT). While technology is a crucial component, the real value of cloud computing lies in its ability to enable new capabilities or in the execution of current capabilities in more efficient ...

Central to the Government Community Cloud model is the development of a ‘Private PaaS’ (Platform as a Service). Public Cloud providers like Azure offer a combination of hosting and built-in software components that make life easier and quicker for software developers, to write, mainta...

With GSA now issuing ATOs and Amazon launching its own government specific cloud, IaaS for government agencies is now a reality. This next step in this "Cloud First" march is a consistent platform on which agencies can securely develop their applications. To focus on this requirement...

On Wednesday, August 17, I had the pleasure of attending a retirement reception for the former Federal CIO, Vivek Kundra. At the reception, Kundra and those who worked closely with him from both government and industry reflected on the exciting dynamics in the federal IT space today. A...

My friends at Trezza Media recently published a couple of great online documents on GovCloud and Cyber. Your should especially check out the "Cloud Chopping Made Easy" by David McClure ..... and Jim Flyzik's viewpoint on building trust in cyberspace.

The UberGlobal case study of a Government Community Cloud highlights the key business benefits of this approach. Similar to the recent Huddle announcement it’s the specific government-classified levels of security compliance that are key, an “IL3 version” of the collaboration app. Th...

Bob Gourley recently wrote about the dangers of a Maginot Line approach to network security in “The Maginot Line of Information Systems Security“, based on of the paper by Dr. Rick Forno. In the Second World War, the French relied on the Maginot Line, a string of fortifications along t...

The State of Michigan’s ‘MiCloud’ strategy is a comprehensive framework for adoption of Cloud Computing by a government agency, one that can act as a best practice blueprint for others to emulate. Most notably they opt not to use the centralized Apps.gov store. Instead they define the...

Military cyber defenders face a tough challenge. Many of them have been trained in warfighting specialties like aviation, infantry, amphibious operations, submarine warfare etc, then one day they wake up with orders to a unit with operational cyber defense responsibilities. I’ve seen ...

On Friday July 1, Infrastructure-as-a-Services for the US federal government became a reality with Authority to Operate (ATO) approval for the following vendors: Web Hosting: CGI Federal, Computer Literacy World, Eyak Technology, Computer Technologies Consultant, Savvis, and Federal S...

What a month! June has really been busy!! Just now getting around to doing a post about CloudExpo 2011 in New York. With over 5000 delegates in attendance, it was just a massive gathering of Clouderatti. Due to another engagement I had at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, DC o...

A few weeks ago I had the distinct pleasure of teaching yet another US Army cloud computing class. This time the venue was Ft. Gordon, GA and the students definitely got it!! Below are presentations from the excellent projects they completed. Thank you all for your focus and energy. ...

The Office of Management and Budget recently released a list of 78 projects slated for transition to cloud over the next year. The most common application, according to a FierceGovernmentIT, is email, with 14 agencies deciding to choose a cloud version. A close second is website hostin...

I find the i-Canada initiative from CATA really quite inspiring, it has the right headline message of 'A New National Dream'. Be sure to read the Declaration and sign it. So I thought the best way to help this campaign, to help realize the stated goals would be to define where and ho...

In our OpenGovernmentCanada.com event we'll be covering 'Open Linked Data'. As part of my work to promote Cloud Computing globally, I'm focused on a number of core technologies that are also key to Open Government. In particular 'Open Linked Data' - See my main summary of this here, ...

Salesforce.com is one option that can be used to implement Open Government. A very good example for this is “Open Civic Engagement, as a Service”, described in this presentation. The slide show talks through how Plone, the open source CMS (Content Management System) can be used in ...

3SO is a perfect example of a use case for the NIST Community Cloud Deployment Model, because they are a “shared services organization” for a number of Healthcare units. A shared services organization is an example of the same community effect at the people and process level. It exis...