GSA and Unisys/Google Marks GovCloud Watershed





As widely reported this week, the United States General Services Administration (GSA) has awarded a contract to Unisys to create a secure cloud-based email and collaboration platform. The solution will be based on Google Apps for Government and is expected to save $15M over the next five years when compared to current staff, infrastructure, and contract support costs.

The award will provide up to 17,000 GSA employees and contractors worldwide with enhanced collaboration services, including email with expanded storage, as well as full access to Google Apps collaboration tools including Google Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites.


The government also extended the public comment period for the The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program or FedRAMP. This program has been established to provide a standard approach to Assessing and Authorizing (A&A) cloud computing services and products. FedRAMP allows joint authorizations and continuous security monitoring services for Government and Commercial cloud computing systems intended for multi-agency use. The risk model will also enable the government to "approve once, and use often" by ensuring multiple agencies gain the benefit and insight of the FedRAMP's Authorization and access to service provider’s authorization packages.

In 2009 the government discovered cloud computing. Now 2010 is clearly the year of implementation.

Bookmark and Share
Cloud Musings
( Thank you. If you enjoyed this article, get free updates by email or RSS - KLJ )

Commentaires

Enregistrer un commentaire

Posts les plus consultés de ce blog

Hacking Into The Indian Education System Reveals Score Tampering

Image
Debarghya Das has a fascinating story on how he managed to bypass a silly web security layer to get access to the results of 150,000 ISCE (10th grade) and 65,000 ISC (12th grade) students in India. While lack of security and total ignorance to safeguard sensitive information is an interesting topic what is more fascinating about this episode is the analysis of the results that unearthed score tampering. The school boards changed the scores of the students to give them "grace" points to bump them up to the passing level. The boards also seem to have tampered some other scores but the motive for that tampering remains unclear (at least to me). I would encourage you to read the entire analysis and the comments , but a tl;dr version is: 32, 33 and 34 were visibly absent. This chain of 3 consecutive numbers is the longest chain of absent numbers. Coincidentally, 35 happens to be the pass mark. Here's a complete list of unattained marks - 36, 37, 39, 41, 43, 45, 47, 49, 51, 53,...
Lire la suite

Information Service and Cloud Dedicated Hosting

Image
Dedicated hosting service, dedicated server, or managed hosting service is a type of internet hosting the client leases an entire server not shared with anyone. It is more flexible than shared hosting, and organizations have full control over the server (s), including choice of operating system, hardware, etc. There is also another level of dedicated or managed hosting managed hosting is called complex. Apply complex managed hosting on physical servers, hybrid server and virtual servers with many companies choose hybrid (a combination of physical and virtual) hosting solution. There are many similarities between the standard and complex managed hosting, but the main difference is the level of administrative support and engineering the customer pays for all because of the growing size and complexity of infrastructure deployment . Steps presented to support most of the administration, including security, memory, storage, and support of information technology. Proactive ser...
Lire la suite

IBM's Blue Cloud Meets Juniper To Alleviate Cloud Computing Adoption Fears

Security and lack of an acceptable SLA are customers' top adoption fears to move to cloud computing . IBM's recent announcements to further advance their cloud computing initiative known as Blue Cloud should help alleviate these fears to some extent. IBM announced their partnership with Juniper for their hybrid cloud initiative to provide secured private cloud with better SLA. IBM also announced new offerings for the cloud - Tivoli storage as service and a new set of cloud management tools to align with what a typical CIO would look for when migrating to the cloud. In addition IBM is pushing some of their existing offerings on the cloud that customers can now use off Amazon's EC2 on pay-as-you-go subscription model . IBM has been experimenting with the concept of a private cloud for a while. One of such experiments included creating a private virtual cloud inside the firewall to deploy some of the regions of SecondLife with seamless navigation in and out of the firewall....
Lire la suite