PDNS Offers “Anchor” Cloud Services to Agile Cloud Consortium

Private Digital Network Services (PDNS) and partners will provide its national, Private Digital Network (PDN) core and a suite of highly sought after services to the Interoperability Clearinghouse Agile Cloud effort. Its partners include Gannett Company Inc., Global Interactive Solutions, ICON Voice, and others. Gannett designed and implemented the PDN to support its national base of 300+ business units, which include well known digital properties such as CareerBuilder.com and Cars.com, and media properties such as DefenseNews and USA Today.  Through a joint services agreement, Gannett has enabled PDNS to leverage this high capacity, national, private network asset to provide network and hosted services to commercial and ST/Local government entities. These services are now being extended to the ICH Agile Cloud effort.  Applications and services to be provided include high speed, hosted voice/video/data, content delivery, virtual machine and storage provisioning and disaster recovery services.

ICH Agile Cloud is an industry-wide effort targeted at developing an open and inclusive cloud service brokerage environment capable of rapidly provisioning innovative technologies to the US Government on a fee for service basis. This cloud services environment will favor existing commercial services over custom development, will incorporate industry standards and will enforce a consistent implementation environment. Additional key characteristics will include:

• Interoperable technologies;
• A consistent acquisition model;
• Standard technical assessment framework; and a
• Standardized service level management model.

A key difference between this and other government focused cloud computing efforts is that the Agile Cloud environment will be funded and implemented by industry with the Government purchasing services "by the byte".

This effort is in response to feedback from a number of Government organizations who advocated for a new compensation model that will implement agile ways to contract with partners, so that “getting a contract could be a simple as clicking a link”. The Agile Cloud consortium will work with all Government partners to develop and implement processes and high-performance technical solutions that allow globally distributed virtual teams to be formed on-demand, based on topics, people’s registered skills and security classifications.

This announcement also comes one week before the 2nd Agile Cloud Environment event, scheduled for May 21, 2014 at TIA Headquarters in Arlington, VA. This event will focus on development of the Agile Cloud Environment Service Catalog and plans to feature a series of prospective government user presentations.

The initial "Vendor Service Registration" period starts now and will close on May 21st. Any company interested in registering their service can do so at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/PD7PV58 .

Government representatives from the following organizations are expected to attend:

• Defense Intelligence Agency
• US Army
• Veteran's Administration
• General Services Administration
• US Navy
• Department of Homeland Security
• Office of the Secretary of Defense
• Defense Information Systems Agency
• Federal Aviation Administration

Following the second event, government representatives will have the opportunity to evaluate all candidate services for mission relevance and applicability. A technical team will also evaluate prospective services for interoperability using criteria outlines by Project Interoperability.

Questions may be sent to AgileCloud@ICHnet.org.

Please join the discussion on the Agile Cloud Environment group on LinkedIn
( https://www.linkedin.com/groups/Agile-Cloud-Working-Group-8103219/about )
 

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

( Thank you. If you enjoyed this article, get free updates by email or RSS - © Copyright Kevin L. Jackson 2012)
-->