networking-info

[Republished from"On The FrontLines" magazine " Cloud Computing in Government: Lesson's Learned " issue. Download t he full 20 page issue online at http://digital. onthefrontlines.net/i/319551 ) In February 2011, Vivek Kundra announced the “Cloud First” policy across the US Government. The directive, issued through the Office of Management and Budget, required agencies to give cloud technology first priority in developing IT projects. He also described cloud computing as a “10 year journey”. According to a Deltek report, federal agency spending on cloud computing will grow from $2.3 billion in fiscal 2013 to $6.1 billion by fiscal 2018. This forecast clearly raises the importance of understanding what has happened over the past few years. In my opinion, the Top 5 most important lessons learned are: When selecting the appropriate deployment model (Public, Private, Hybrid or Community) don’t reflexively pick private as the “obvious low risk choice”. Private clo...

Google has published a paper outlining their approach on using machine learning, a neural network to be specific, to reduce energy consumption in their data centers. Joe Kava, VP, Data Centers at Google also has a blog post explaining the backfround and their approach. Google has one of the best data center designs in the industry and takes their PUE (power usage effectiveness) numbers quite seriously. I blogged about Google's approach to optimize PUE almost five years back! Google has come a long way and I hope they continue to publish such valuable information in public domain. There are a couple of key takeaways. In his presentation at Data Centers Europe 2014 Joe said:   As for hardware, the machine learning doesn’t require unusual computing horsepower, according to Kava, who says it runs on a single server and could even work on a high-end desktop. This is a great example of a small data Big Data problem. This neural network is a supervised learning approach where you creat...

Congratulations to my friends at "On The FrontLines Magazine" for an EXCELLENT presentation of important operational and managerial cloud computing transition lessons. This issues showcases cloud computing leaders from government and the private sector that share their views on this critical topic. A few of the educational gems enclosed in this 20 PAGE ISSUE:   Matt Goodrich, FedRAMP Program Manager, GSA - “The first one is security is largely not a technical issue. If you look at any sort of management of anything, technical things and problems are usually pretty easy to solve and there’s a quick ability to do that.” The second is management of people is hard. “If you look at management classes anywhere, it’s never management of technical things, it’s always managing the people who run cloud environments; and managing those processes is always really the harder portion of this.”    LTC Paul Stanton, US Cyber Command, US Army - “[Cloud is] .. truly revolutionizing the way...

From “ military dedication ” to “ civilian success, ” Veterans 360 Services is approaching the challenging transition of military service to civilian life with an innovative, focused and all-inclusive, 360 degree, process of education and employment. This San Diego-based veteran ’ s non-profit wants to lead the way to get recently-separated veterans into the workforce with an exciting and meaningful career in emerging cloud technology services. As Founder and CEO Rick Collins points out, “ Since we are routinely engaging veterans, providing vocational training and transitional support, why not monetize these services and offer them to corporate clients so that while they benefit on a corporate level, we also benefit financially to sustain and grow our organization. ” Veterans 360 Services will be reaching out to corporate clients to offer business-relevant services such as veteran recruitment, IT training and on-the-job and internship consulting. “If you have a smartphone, you are u...

Thank you to all that participated in yesterday's ICH Agile Cloud Service Catalog event.    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.   Yesterday's event focused on the development of the Agile Cloud Environment Service Catalog. The meeting featured presentations from GSA, US Navy and US Army  on their desires and expectations with regard to the postulated cloud services. Other Government attendees also contributed their views and recommendations. Industry attendees also engaged in many informative and instructional exchanges. Presentations from the conference are provided below. Agile Cloud Conference...