Get into the GEOINT groove

Posted on October 29, 2010 by Tim Harder

The GEOINT 2010 Symposium, the preeminent geospatial intelligence event for the defense, intelligence and homeland security communities, is coming up next week at the Ernest N Morial Convention Center‎ in New Orleans, La.

With such an important event on the horizon, I sat down this week with the editor-in-chief of the blog got geoint?, Matt Langan. Matt and I recorded a podcast interview about the role of cloud computing in the geospatial intelligence field.

If you’d like to take a listen, click HERE.

If you’re planning on attending this year’s GEOINT 2010 Symposium, EMC and I will be there at booth #821. Feel free to drop by to say, “hi,” or to talk about the cloud.

We’ll also be hosting a reception with Cisco and VMWare in the Legend room of the Musee Conti, a wax museum located in the Old French Quarter. The reception runs from 6-9pm on November 2, 2010. Click HERE if you’d like to register to come!

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How STEM subjects impact cloud adoption

Posted on October 28, 2010 by Tim Harder

In a recent post, I discussed how I had attended the Cyber Solutions Conference, a one-day event in Baltimore organized by the Federal Business Council, Inc. in collaboration with the National Cyber Security Alliance.

The event focused on the collective responsibility of government, industry and academia to concentrate on cyber solutions and security. Interestingly enough, one of the major undercurrents and themes of the show was the current state of our country’s education system. The lack of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education in our country’s schools was a much discussed problem.

Unfortunately, our country continues to fall behind in the education of STEM subjects, and the end result has been under-qualified individuals entering the IT field. Similar to certificate programs that were prevalent in the 1990s, the STEM-deficient education being given to America’s youth is limiting the value of the people going into the IT industry.

These IT professionals aren’t equipped as “cyber warriors” in today’s challenging cyber security environment. They’re also responsible for another big problem negatively impacting IT departments…they’re slowing down the adoption of cloud computing.

At the executive office level, CTOs and CIOs are becoming increasingly interested in aligning cloud computing to the IT mission. Unfortunately, some poorly equipped IT people who are actually executing on the mission see cloud computing as “giving up the keys to the kingdom.” It’s a threat to them to “outsource” their network infrastructure.

Better educated and more talented IT professionals look at cloud computing differently. These individuals view the movement of commodity infrastructure operations to the cloud as freeing up time to execute higher level tasks that can help the agency better accomplish the mission. They’re not threatened by cloud computing because it gives them the opportunity to increase their value quotient to the enterprise and become more aligned to mission enablement.

It’s for these reasons that even senior leadership in government, industry and academia are calling STEM subjects a national priority. STEM subjects are imperative if our country is going to improve its cyber security and make advancements in IT innovation and datacenter infrastructure.

That’s why EMC has worked so hard to try and promote STEM subject education in America’s schools. Here are some projects that the company has implemented to advance STEM amongst students. Drop us a comment and let us know what you or your company are doing to support STEM instruction. Can we really afford not to do anything?

Click here for the Holyoke, Massachusetts program:

Click here for our Math program

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Is GSA’s BPA for IaaS enough to spark federal cloud adoption?

Posted on October 26, 2010 by Tim Harder

In a recent post on GovCloudTalk, we discussed the federal accreditation process for IT services and solutions.

We took a look at the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) and how it required vendors to get accredited by each individual government agency. This has effectively slowed down the adoption of cloud computing in the government while increasing the cost of products and services to the government.

We also looked at the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) which was designed to fast track cloud computing acquisitions by enabling vendors to receive just one accreditation to do business with many government agencies. Despite FedRAMP’s potential to bring these money-saving technologies to the government, the implemention has been slow.

Last week, the General Services Administration (GSA) took a major positive step forward towards expediting the adoption of cloud computing. The GSA awarded 11 vendors spots on the first government-wide contract for cloud computing.

The GSA’s blanket purchase agreement (BPA) will make infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solutions, including cloud storage, virtual machines and Web hosting, available through the Apps.gov portal, a GSA storefront for federal agencies to learn about and purchase cloud services.

The winning vendors were:

  • Apptis Inc. partnered with Amazon Web Services
  • AT&T
  • Autonomic Resources partnered with Carpathia, Enomaly and Dell
  • CGI Federal
  • Computer Literacy World partnered with Electrosoft, XO Communications and Secure Networks
  • Computer Technology Consultants partnered with Softlayer, Inc.
  • Eyak Tech LLC
  • General Dynamics Information Technology partnered with Carpathia
  • Insight Public Sector partnered with Microsoft
  • Savvis Federal Systems
  • Verizon Federal Inc.

These 11 vendors now have the ability to sell their IaaS services through the Apps.gov portal, but it’s just the first of many steps. The GSA is expected to pursue BPAs for software-as-a-service, email-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service in the future.

As I said, this is a positive step forward in the adoption of cloud computing in the federal government. And it’s definitely coming at the right time, when its cost-savings are sorely needed due to increasing national debt. Unfortunately, it’s still not enough.

These vendors still need to meet FISMA accreditation standards before they can be made completely available to federal agencies. This means that despite the BPA and addition of these solutions to the Apps.gov portal, they’re still not available for agencies to purchase and implement. These vendors still have to pursue GSA certification and accreditation.

Although the GSA is taking steps to bring the federal government into the cloud, there’s still much that needs to be done. FedRAMP needs to be implemented to help speed and simplify the accreditation process. PaaS, SaaS and other solutions need to be embraced as well.

Until cloud services are available via Apps.gov and accreditation is expedited, the government will continue to miss out on the efficiency and cost-savings that comes form a move to the cloud.

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Different agencies have different problems – with the same solution

Posted on October 21, 2010 by Tim Harder

It’s very difficult to look at the federal government as a whole and find one overarching IT problem that all agencies are facing.

The fact is, there are too many agencies and organizations within the federal government with far too many differing missions to truly say that one IT problem affects them all equally.

Within the government you have civilian agencies, defense agencies and intelligence agencies. These different kinds of agencies understandably operate with varying amounts of transparency, require varying levels of data security and ingest, manage and store different amounts of data. As a result, they will see some overlap in their IT challenges, but tend to have their own unique challenges that the other agencies either don’t face, or don’t struggle with as mightily.

Ironically, despite their drastically different IT challenges and needs, one single solution – a switch to the cloud – could equally assist these agencies. Let’s take a look at the different kinds of agencies, the challenges that they face, and the way that cloud computing could help overcome them:

Civilian agencies

Little Timmy turns 17 and passes his first driver’s exam with flying colors. All of his information is entered into a system at the local DMV. His picture is taken. A license is issued.

But the DMV gets something else in return. They now have a picture of Little Timmy and all of his information that needs to be stored as data. They also have to manage that data and ensure that it is archived in such a way that it can be accessed again in two weeks when Little Timmy misplaces his first license. It also has to be shared with the local police department and other agencies who need to know Timmy’s information should he get caught speeding or accidentally take out a mailbox (although I am currently contesting a D.C. area speeding ticket….I haven’t hit a mailbox or lost a drivers license in some time…I swear…).

This story may sound silly, but it perfectly encapsulates one of the largest problems facing civilian agencies. Since they serve the public, there are often mountains of scanned forms, ID photos, tax records and every other kind of data imaginable that needs to be ingested, stored and managed.

Much of this data is coming in from disparate, untethered devices. This influx of unstructured content from distributed sources needs to be ingested in extraordinary amounts and also needs to be managed with a small staff.

By shifting to cloud computing, civilian agencies can almost infinitely extend their amount of data storage. Cloud computing can also help them to overcome the “big data” issues that arise from the sheer size of the amount of data they ingest. A shift to the cloud also makes sharing information both within and between agencies easier.

Defense agencies

Defense agencies have some of the same problems that civilian agencies do regarding the ingestion, management and storing of large amounts of data. Soldiers have IDs, military technology has manuals and there are equally large mountains of forms and other information that needs to be stored.

However, some things unique to the defense agencies are their need for high security, and their ability to deliver information about what’s happening on the battlefield to the decision and policy makers thousands of miles away.

Defense agencies have multiple, disparate command and control systems that need to be accessed in different places and by different audiences at different times. Web enabling command and control systems makes them more scalable, accessible and efficient.

From a security standpoint, cloud computing can help agencies consolidate datacenters and then focus all of their resources on securing the datacenters that remain. Some cloud infrastructures such as private clouds can also provide security that is in fact better than many federal datacenters.

Intelligence agencies

Once again, I can’t say that intelligence agencies don’t suffer from the same IT challenges that we’ve laid out above, because they do. In fact, the large network of sensors and other untethered input devices utilized by America’s intelligence community creates very similar problems in ingesting, managing and storing data that civilian agencies have.

Information sharing is one IT challenge facing intelligence agencies that, although not unique to them alone, is exasperated by their specific mission. Intelligence agencies have many personnel, offices and branches distributed across the globe. These distributed presences need the ability to share information and data to ensure that the latest intelligence is available where it’s needed most.

Embracing cloud computing is extraordinarily important for intelligence agencies due to its ability to increase information sharing both inside an agency, and between agencies.

There are multiple challenges facing all areas of the federal government today. Each agency will struggle with one of these challenges more than others due to their mission, their need for transparency and the sensitivity of their data. But, regardless of which problem is the biggest for an agency, some type of cloud computing can be the answer.

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Missing datacenters a symbol of inefficiency and poor security

Posted on October 19, 2010 by Tim Harder

Last week I attended the Cyber Solutions Conference, a one-day conference and exposition held by the Federal Business Council, Inc. in collaboration with the National Cyber Security Alliance. The event was up in Baltimore and functioned to bring together government, industry and academia to concentrate on the collective responsibility of cyber solutions and security.

One of the things that many of the experts agreed upon was that the cloud was going to help improve cybersecurity for the federal government.

Why? Because the adoption of cloud computing means less datacenters, which means that the government could invest more resources into the security of each individual datacenter. Instead of using limited resources to build multiple “fences,” each around a different datacenter, they can instead use those resources to build a much higher fence around fewer datacenters.

Ironically, the day before the conference began, the actual number of federal datacenters increased almost two-fold. They didn’t actually build more overnight, they simply had managed to lose track of over 1,000 of them. According to an article published in Data Center Knowledge just hours before the conference began, an updated inventory by federal agencies showed that the federal government has 2,094 datacenters, nearly 1,000 more than previously estimated.

First off…how do you lose a datacenter? We’re talking about a room larger than 500 square feet dedicated to data processing…not your car keys! But regardless of how the datacenters were lost (or misplaced, if you will) they further exasperate the security situation. 1,000 more datacenters is 1,000 more fences that need to be built. The resources of which to build those fences just got spread even thinner.

And security is just one problem facing the federal government and their 2,094 datacenters.

As we’ve discussed previously, datacenters are extraordinarily expensive to run. They require large amounts of power. They take up a lot of room. They need to be cooled. New technologies require upgrades. They also need to be maintained and repaired. These recurring costs, multiplied 2,094 times, are a huge expense that the federal government simply can’t afford in the current economic climate and in light of our crushing national debt.

The presence of these previously “lost” datacenters brings increased urgency to the adoption of cloud computing in the federal government. By consolidating these datacenters and embracing cloud solutions, the government could reduce the number of datacenters they have. The result would less datacenters to secure with their limited cybersecurity resources, resulting in higher fences around each individual datacenter. They would also save significant amounts of taxpayer dollars.

Now that these datacenters have been found…let’s get rid of them. Can the federal government really afford not to?

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A Cloudy Forecast – IT giants learn how to lobby DC

Posted on October 14, 2010 by Tim Harder

I’m not just jazzed about cloud computing because it’s a cool use of technology – although it is! A big reason I’m excited about the federal cloud is the potential is has to disrupt the typical federal IT buy cycle, and accelerate time to value for government dollars.

But this isn’t exciting to everyone. While technologists love disruptive technology, businessmen don’t. That’s because when there is disruption, there is the possibility for incumbents in any market to lose profits and/or market share. And no entrenched company wants that to happen.

So unfortunately, some big names in cloud are looking to cozy up to the Washington way of doing things. Case in point – Amazon and Google. Those two companies have favorable cloud pedigrees in the private sector, and have been making a lot of noise about the benefits on the cloud for government.

But they’re not taking any chances getting their messages through. Both companies have greatly increased the amount of money they are spending on DC lobbying. In fact, Google has upped it’s spend 41% in Q2, according to TechCrunch. And most of us remember the story back in April when leaked emails revealed that Andrew McLaughlin, former chief lobbyist for Google and now deputy CTO in the Obama Administration, was staying in regular contact with his former employer. The firm provided over 800k in contributions to the Obama campaign and helped to secure staffers key appointment positions including : Transition Staff, Director of Citzen Participation, Head of Social Innovation, Council of Science and Technology Advisors and Deputy Technology Czar.

In Amazon’s case, they’ve spent over $1M lobbying to date in 2010. This compares to  spending only $1.34M in all of 2008, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Federal customers need to recognize that the cloud should deliver not just better performance, but a better price. They need to demand a better product and a better procurement process from their chosen cloud provider.

One irony here in that trying to protect their interests, the incumbents are missing a huge business opportunity. Contracting for cloud services in the right way means a whole new kind of partnership between government and integrator – one that benefits both parties. The first company that lets go of the past and embraces the new cloud model will have a huge, first mover advantage. It’s the right thing to do, and will pay off handsomely for both the Feds and that company’s shareholders.

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Tell us what you want to read about!

Posted on October 12, 2010 by Tim Harder

Many government IT leaders and decision makers recognize that the future of their data centers is in the cloud, but many have some serious questions about cloud computing that they need answered.

What kind of cloud is best for the agency? How do I articulate the relevance of cloud computing to our mission? How do we secure our infrastructure? These are all contemporary challenges for agency leadership.

I launched GovCloudTalk to help answer your questions about the cloud. However, the blog can only be a useful tool if I’m discussing the topics that matter most to you.

To help guide my editorial direction and figure out what is most important to my readers, I’ve set up a quick survey to learn what matters most in your agency and data center.

Please take a second to let me know what you would like to read about most. The survey is available online at:


http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/8-questions-about-the-cloud

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Federal cloud accrediting has a need…a need for speed

Posted on October 12, 2010 by Tim Harder

We’ve talked multiple times on this blog about the incredible cost savings that government organizations and agencies could realize by embracing cloud computing. In light of our nation’s ongoing financial situation, saddled with debt and looking everywhere for costs to cut, the time to implement cloud infrastructures across the government and consolidate existing datacenters is now.

Unfortunately, there is more standing in the way between government agencies and cloud computing than just concerns about security. There’s also a lot of red tape to cut through. What’s worse, this red tape is doing nothing but costing the government even more money, all while it tries to cut costs.

The problem resides in the accreditation process. For a technology vendor to do business with a federal agency, they need to be given three separate stamps of approval: one for the datacenter, one for the people and process involved and one for the product. These stamps of approval are different from agency to agency across the federal government and the process to acquire them is not cheap.

This means that every time a company wants to sell a cloud solution to the government, they need to go through an expensive accreditation process with each and every agency, at a significant cost to that company. But this is business, and you can be sure that those companies aren’t going to foot the bill. The same way defense contractors mark up their projects to accommodate the costs incurred during their red-tape-filled sales process, these technology companies pass the cost of their accreditation right back to the government.

The end result? The government is delaying the implementation of cost-saving cloud solutions by tying them up in bureaucratic approval processes. They’re also subsequently increasing the cost of these solutions when they are approved for purchase.

There have been programs put in place in the past designed to implement information security programs in the federal government, including the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). FISMA was intended to create consistent and cost-effective application of security controls across the federal information technology infrastructure. Unfortunately FISMA compliance, which would provide stamps of approval for multiple agencies across the government, remains extremely expensive for vendors.

In an attempt to rectify the shortcoming in FISMA and speed up the approval process to get cloud computing through the door at federal agencies, the government is working on something new.

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP, was adopted this year to provide joint authorizations and continuous security monitoring of cloud solutions for federal agencies. FedRAMP would create security requirements among federal agencies, ensure compatible security requirements on shared systems, eliminate duplication of effort and allow solutions to be acquired faster and easier.

The FedRAMP Program is a good one, with significant potential to cut down on the time to acquire cloud solutions and reduce the cost of approvals, which will, in turn, cut the cost of the solutions themselves. But FedRAMP has taken a long time to come to fruition. A very long time. In the meantime, the private sector has continued to innovate new technology as the government continues to take its time approving, purchasing and implementing older technology.

For the government to catch up and start doing business at the speed of the private sector, wholesale changes are needed. An antiquated system that focuses on taxonomies and terminology needs to be replaced with one that focuses more on allowing the federal government to do business at a faster pace. Only then will money-saving technologies come to our cash-strapped government at the right price.

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A trillion reasons to embrace cloud computing

Posted on October 7, 2010 by Tim Harder

It’s no secret that the ongoing economic downturn has had a significant impact on our country. In an effort to stimulate the economy after the housing market, financial services and stock market collapses, the government proceeded to bail out banks, give money to auto companies and spend on major infrastructure projects to provide an economic spark.

The end result? The impact of the stimulus spending has been debated, although a recent report from the White House is very positive. Regardless, the spending has put the country further into debt than before. This enormous national debt and budget deficit has left Washington scrambling, with Republicans and Democrats battling over allowing tax cuts to expire, cutting spending on government programs and other ways to reduce costs.

On Wednesday, the Technology CEO Council, an industry group comprised of seven chief executives from leading technology companies, including EMC, I.B.M. and Intel, met with government leaders and proposed another answer. Just make the government operate more efficiently and less expensively.

According to the Council, the government could save approximately $1 trillion by utilizing new, more efficient technologies. One of those technologies is cloud computing.

As we’ve discussed in previous posts, there are a handful of different ways that cloud computing cuts costs. One of these ways is datacenter consolidation.

Cloud computing enables government agencies and organizations to physically reduce the number of datacenters that they have. These datacenters take up large amounts of real estate and tear through energy. By reducing the number of datacenters, the government can cut down on the amount of physical space that they lease or own, and significantly reduce their recurring utility bills.

Energy and real estate are just some of the recurring costs that cloud computing can help eliminate from the federal IT budget. Cloud computing can significantly reduce the initial hardware costs for provisioning and building datacenters, and effectively future-proof government datacenters. This means that new hardware won’t need to be purchased every time a new technology gets adopted by the government, such as video teleconferencing for telework (which has its own cost savings benefits).

Despite the sheer savings that cloud computing and other new technologies can bring to the government, there are roadblocks to their adoption. Although the government’s chief information officer, Vivek Kundra, has endorsed the adoption of many of these technologies, Congress still needs to pass the funding for them.

Hopefully, the meetings between the Technology CEO Council and government officials, including Lawrence H. Summers, director of the National Economic Council; Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers; Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Fed; and Mr. Zeints of the budget office, will bear fruit and help some of these money saving technologies get adopted. It’s a better solution than cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits, and a lot less painful!

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How you can go cloud and retain total control…

Posted on October 5, 2010 by Tim Harder

We’ve talked extensively on this blog about the benefits of cloud computing and why a foray into the cloud is the future for all organizations in both the private and public sector.

However, for many public sector entities, from state and local governments to federal agencies, there are significant concerns about a move to the cloud. Many of these concerns are about security of sensitive data and losing control of the datacenter.

Control doesn’t have to be a stumbling bock for cloud adoption. Cloud is nothing more than the aggregation and delivery of infrastructure services as a utility model. At the end of the day, there’s only a few moving pieces, including: applications, computing, routing/switching, storage, metering, billing, chargeback and resource allocation.

Every large data center environment has some mix of these assets today, but many of them are completely underutilized. To retain total control of your cloud you need to obtain total control of the assets in your datacenter environment and utilize them to their maximum efficiency.

Here’s how:

Step 1 – Virtualize: Virtualize your application and compute layers by deploying hypervisor technology. Enlist the help of your user community and identify a collection of applications that are consuming the most physical property and plant to model the effort. Measure the results.

Step 2 – Consolidate storage: Virtualized and consolidated environments benefit from consolidated storage. Provision a storage system built and designed to work in concert with your hypervisor technology. A consolidated storage system can be acquired for between $200 – $2 Million depending upon your organization needs.

Step 3 – Embrace virtual networking: Consider a networking topology in support of your new virtualized environment by leveraging virtual networking. Cisco, Arista and other vendors have delivered very powerful virtual switching technology that your organization could take advantage of.

Step 4 – Metering: Have a team of developers build your own metering, billing, chargeback and provisioning system.

Step 5 – Authority to Operate: Get the whole system accredited, patched and otherwise authorized to operate.

This seems like a lot of work to have total control of your cloud environment. Here’s an easier way:

Phase 1: Architecture matters. Does your security posture demand that data sets stay inside of your perimeter or can they be shared publicly?

Phase 2: Retask your existing assets to cloud enable them. If you do not have any existing assets, or are building a new environment, consider an integrated stack offering.

Phase 3: Measure and inspect the impact on the hard costs and uptime stats that are important to your mission. Do not be afraid to measure speed of provisioning. Remember, cloud is as much a technology as it is a business model.

If cloud assets live inside of your organizations perimeter, you can leverage your existing authorize/authenticate/audit systems. Also consider adding object based interfaces like SOAP and REST to future proof the environment.

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