INPUT FedFocus 2010

Please join me at the 7th Annual FedFocus Conference, November 5, 2009, at the Ritz Carlton in McLean, VA. This conference has been designed to provide crucial information on upcoming federal government procurement plans. I will be the morning keynote, speaking on the use of cloud computing technologies to increase government efficiency and transparency. The rest of the day's speakers include:

• Vish Sankaran,Program Director, Federal Health Architecture, Officer of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology,U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (featured here on June 22nd)


• Jim Borland,Special Advisor for Health IT,Office of the Commissioner, Social Security Administration (featured here on June 25th)


• Capt. Michael Weiner,Medical Corps, U.S. Navy, Acting Deputy Program Manager and Chief Medical Officer, Defense Health Information Management System


• Bruce McConnell,Cybersecurity Counselor to Deputy Under Secretary Philip Reitinger, National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD),U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS Asst. Sec. for Cybersecurity Greg Schaffer featured here August 11th)


• David W. Stender, CISSP,Associate Chief Information Officer for Cyber Security, Chief Information Security Officer,Internal Revenue Service


• Dr. Ron Ross,Senior Computer Scientist and Information Security Researcher, National Institute of Standards and Technology


• Dr. Richard W. Etter, CISSP,Acting Senior Information Assurance Officer, Department of the Navy


• Pete Crichlow,IT Security Staff, US Department of Justice

The day's highlights will also include an in-depth review of the top 20 federal opportunities for 2010, budget outlook for civilian and defense spending in 2010, national cybersecurity initiative and implications for the market and a Health IT forecast.

UPDATE:

There were 300+ attendees at the FedFocus session on government cloud computing. Thank you all for attending. As requested, my presention is now available via Slideshare.

Input Fed Focus 2010 Presentation

View more documents from Kevin Jackson.

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Dataline, Lockheed Martin, SAIC, Unisys on Tactical Cloud Computing

I'm proud to announce that representatives from Lockheed Martin, SAIC, and Unisys will join me in a Tactical Cloud Computing "Power Panel" at SYS-CON's 1st Annual Government IT Conference & Expo in Washington DC on October 6, 2009.

As Technical Chair of this conference, my goal has been to provide useful and actionable information to the conference attendees. While the industry has engaged in a rigorous discussion around "enterprise" cloud computing, information on tactical or deployable cloud computing possibilities has been scarce. To address this, I've asked Dataline partners to join me and share their views on this issue.

Tactical Cloud Computing refers to the use of cloud computing technology and techniques for the support of localized and short-lived information access and processing requirements. Use cases could include:

• “Cloudbursting” to support cyclic data processing requirements
• Establishing a cloud-based collaboration environment in order to coordinate firefighting resources during a wildfire
• Virtually binding shipboard IT infrastructures in order to create a battlegroup infrastructure-as-a-service platform
• Virtually binding land vehicle based servers and storage resources into a battlefield data center
• Dynamic provisioning of virtual cloud-based servers in order to automate exploitation and dissemination of unmanned air vehicle (UAV) streaming video feeds
• This discussion panel will explore how defense, homeland security and law enforcement organizations are looking to leverage this new and exciting IT capability.

Please register and join us for this unique opportunity. First 50 registrants are eligible for a VIP pass !!

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GSA, DoD and NCOIC to Collaborate on Government Cloud Computing

Yesterday, during the NCOIC Cloud Computing Workshop, collaboration seemed to be the focus as Katie Lewin, GSA Cloud Computing Initiative Program manager, and Dan Risacher, DoD Cloud Computing Storefront project lead, both offered to collaborate on cloud computing with the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC). As the interim chairman of the NCOIC Cloud Computing Working Group (CCWG), I welcomed the offer and promised that the NCOIC will do it's part and serve as their "industry panel" in this quickly evolving space.

In line with the NCOIC mission, the CCWG was chartered to collaborate and engage with other cloud activities to look at standards-based solutions specifically for government mission areas. The overarching goal is to ensure peer-to-peer cloud interoperability, improve usability/trust of the cloud and establish portability across clouds. In support of the established NCOIC Integrated Project Teams (IPTs), the CCWG will work to establishment cloud computing standards in the following mission areas:

• Aviation
• Command, Control & Communications Interoperability
• Net Enabled Emergency Response
• Sense & Respond Logistics
• Maritime; and
• Cyber Security

To accomplish it's task, CCWG member have identified current industry activities as input
sources to specific NCOIC deliverables. This roadmap will be used to initially guide the working
groups activities.

Yesterday's NCOIC Cloud Computing Workshop impressive list of speakers included:

• Katie Lewin, Chief of Staff, Program Manager, Cloud Computing Initiative GSA Office of the Chief Information Officer - Federal Cloud Initiative
• Brand Niemann - Senior Enterprise Architect, US EPA - Semantic Cloud Computing & Open Linked Data Pattern
• Dan Risacher Enterprise Services & Integration Office of the DoD CIO - Cloud Computing and the DoD CIO Storefront
• MG Stephen Gross (USAFR) NEER IPT Chair Deputy Director Deloitte & Touche Center for Cyber Innovation - Using a CloudComputing Model to Establish Net-Enabled Emergency Response (NEER) Core Services
• Dr. Craig A. Lee, President, Open Grid Forum - Driving Coordination and Progress in Cloud Standards
• Nils Puhlmann, Cloud Security Alliance - Cloud Security
• Peter Mell, NIST, Information Technology Laboratory - A Roadmap for Cloud Standards
• Robert Vietmeyer, Forge.mil Project Director - Forge.mil Overview
• John Willis - Cloud Computing Use Case Group - Cloud Computing Use Cases

For further information on the NCOIC Cloud Computing Working Group, please contact Tim Thomas, tim.thomas@ncoic.org (membership) or Patricia Perlini, patricia.perlini@verizon.net (Public Relations).
UPDATE:

During the second day of the NCOIC Plenary session the Services Working Group held a great follow-up session that included a brief from Henry Sienkiewicz, Technical Program Director, Computing Services at DISA. His Cloud Computing: A perspective, provides an excellent overview of the Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE), the GIG Content Delivery Service (GCDS) and Forge.mil, DISA's collaborative platform for software development

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FederalNewsRadio Highlights Government Cloud Computing

Last week's Apps.gov announcement was the latest steps in the government's "at the quick step" march into cloud computing. FederalNewsRadio, a Washington metro area media fixture, highlighted the event with an interview with GSA CIO Casey Coleman and the Associate Administrator for the GSA Office of Citizen Services, Dave McClure.

"This is just the beginning of a long, multi-year process for the federal government to realize the promise of cloud computing," said Coleman. "The Cloud will help to operate at a lower cost, to operate in a more sustainable, more green fashion and be able to implement solutions more quickly and get to mission values more rapidly which will help to serve the tax payers better."

McClure also explained that agencies will now have the option of buying a service. "It comes at a metered price based on usage, demand and capacity that you are shooting for. If you need more, you can buy more but you don't have to buy more than you need."

USA.gov is one of the first programs to use the cloud. According to McClure, so far the website has saved $1.7 million in infrastructure. He also highlighted the site's time efficiency stating that what used to take USA.gov weeks or months to update now takes just minutes or at most a day.
Ms. Coleman chimed in saying, "Agility is the number one benefit of cloud computing. Cost savings is number two."

Coleman also thinks the cloud may one day be even more secure than the current programs.

"There are not that many federal security experts out there so if we can put them all together, sharing information on the cloud, then they could protect the system even more than they do now."

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NCOIC Officially Launches Cloud Computing Working Group

On Wednesday, 9 September 2009 the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC) Technical Council formally approved the creation of a Cloud Computing Working Group (CCWG). Organizationally this new working group will operate as part of the Specialized Frameworks Functional Team.

The initial CCWG charter provides the following direction to the group:

• Collaboration & engagement with government Cloud activities, standard bodies, vendors and NCOIC member companies to look at standards-based Cloud Computing to achieve capabilities such as peer-to-peer interoperability, improved usability and trust of the cloud, and portability across clouds.
• Document current state of best practices, architectures and blue prints for commercially-available implementations, including examining security implications and how to implement an internal cloud.

- “In-Field”, Edge, and Enterprise Clouds - dynamic integration of capability, resource, and accepted configurations to solve a business/operational need

- “Infrastructure cloud" standards to develop consensus across vendors to reduce lock-in to a given vendor or platform.

- Develop Net-Centric Patterns on well developed instances

- Layered Quality of Service for Cloud Computing

• Explore the effects between the cloud computing paradigm and other NCOIC deliverables like NIF, NCAT etc., including adding our Cloud Computing taxonomy to the NCOIC Lexicon.

Kevin Jackson (Dataline, LLC) will serve as the groups interim chairman while Robert Marcus (SRI International) was designated as the interim Vice-Chairman. Formal elections for all leadership positions will be scheduled within the month.

The CCWG is enjoying strong NCOIC membership support with a roster that includes representation from the following companies:

• BAE Systems
• Boeing
• Cisco Systems
• Dataline, LLC
• EADS
• Finmeccanica
• Harris Corporation
• IBM
• Lockheed Martin Corporation
• OASD(NII) / DoD CIO
• SRI International
• The MITRE Corporation

For additional information, feel free to contact any of the following:

• Kevin Jackson, kevin.jackson@dataline.com
  
• Robert Marcus, robert.marcus@sri.com
  
• TIm Thomas, tim.thomas@ncoic.org
  

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1 Billion Mobile Cloud Computing Subscribers !!

Yes. That's what I said! A recent EDL Consulting article cites the rising popularity of smartphones and other advanced mobile devices as the driving force behind a skyrocketing mobile cloud computing market.

According to ABI Research, the current figure for mobile cloud computing subscribers worldwide in 2008 was 42.8 million, representing 1.1 percent of all mobile subscribers. The 2014 figure of 998 million will represent almost 19 percent of all mobile subscribers. They also predicted that business productivity applications will take the lead in mobile cloud computing applications, including collaborative document sharing, scheduling, and sales force automation.

"The major platform-as-a-service providers - Force.com, Google and Amazon - are expected to start "aggressively" marketing their mobile capabilities starting in 2010. An earlier study from ABI Research reported that mobile cloud computing will generate annual revenues of more than $20 billion by 2014."

With that recent bit of news, let's look back at an August Government Computer News article:

• The U.S. Postal Service has equipped nearly 9,500 senior and operational managers with BlackBerrys, giving them access to real-time information and alerts they need to make decisions about services USPS provides to the public.
• The Census Bureau has deployed the Microsoft Windows Mobile operating system on 140,000 handheld personal digital assistants that census workers use during the decennial head count.
• Users of Army Knowledge Online (AKO) will be able to access and send sensitive information through a secure mobile platform using Windows Mobile devices.

And.......

• President Barack Obama, for whom security is paramount, kept his BlackBerry after taking office — but not before it was locked down with strong encryption and security provisions to protect e-mail and communications with his inner circle.

As my friend James Urquhart put it in his recent Wisdom of the Clouds post, enterprise cloud computing has indeed come of age.

"[O]ne has to wonder as application architectures adjust to cloud computing, how much longer they are going to be tightly coupled to data center architectures. At what point will it no longer be advantageous for application owners to define infrastructure in terms of servers, storage, and security devices?"

The timing of secure cloud computing technologies and secure mobile devices couldn't have been better.

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NCOIC Holding Full-Day Cloud Computing Workshop

The Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium will be holding an all day Cloud Computing Workshop on September 21, 2009 in Fairfax, VA. Open to the public, this workshop will focus on Net-Centric Standards and Best Practices for Cloud Storefronts and Cloud Computing Support for Tactical Networks. Invited speakers include:

• Katie Lewin from the General Services Administration with insight into the US Federal Cloud Computing Initiative
• Dan Risacher (OSD-NII) on the US Department of Defense cloud computing activities
• Peter Tseronis, Department of Energy Deputy CIO and Chair, Federal CIO Cloud Computing Working Group
• Craig Lee on the Cloud Standards Coordination Group
• Peter Mell of the National Institute of Standards and Technology
• John Willis co-author of the Cloud Use Cases Group's, Cloud Computing Use Cases White Paper
• Rob Vietmeyer of the Defense Information Systems Agency

The NCOIC is a unique collaboration of premier leaders in the aerospace, defense, information technology, large-scale integrator and services industries. The Consortium works in tandem with customers from around the world, each with a specific mission, to provide a set of tools that enable the development of network centric capabilities and products. An example of the consortium's unique capabilities the recent agreement between NCOIC and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to advance the Enterprise Architecture of NextGen, FAA’s national airspace (NAS) transformation program. The NCOIC will analyze and evaluate NextGen’s enterprise architecture views, products, plans, net-centric patterns and operational concepts. Working collaboratively, its members will develop “voice of industry” recommendations about applying net-centric standards to the NextGen procurement, as a way to achieve interoperability in the NAS and, potentially, the skies beyond U.S. borders.

Registration for the workshop is available at https://www.ncoic.org/events/plenaries_council/

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