While Federal agencies are making progress in moving to the cloud, challenges exist in tracking the cost savings benefits of those moves due to a lack of agency-level guidance and confusion about tracking under guidance from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), according to a report released by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on Monday, May 6. […]

The General Services Administration (GSA) outlined ten tips for Federal agencies to follow in their efforts to migrate to cloud-based systems as part of a cloud smart push. […]

According to a new survey, a majority of organizations keep at least some of their mission-critical apps in the cloud, signaling a shift in how enterprises place their trust in cloud services. […]

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is looking to establish an enterprise-wide approach to data analytics in the cloud and application development, according to a request for information (RFI) released Tuesday, April 30. Responses are due May 6. […]

Professional services company, Accenture, has won a blanket purchase order agreement contract – worth a potential $2 billion – from the Department of Energy (DOE), according to a news release on the company’s website. […]

U.S. Navy Cybersecurity Division Director Rear Admiral Danelle Barrett hashed out the Navy’s effort to modernize its on-ship communication network architecture to simplify data accessibility at Gov Exec’s April 25 Mission to Modernize. […]

With the Department of Defense focused on artificial intelligence (AI) to support the warfighter, cloud computing will be a big part in getting tools out to the tactical edge, said Dana Deasy, CIO of the department, at GDIT Emerge on April 23. […]

With the increasing ubiquity of internet of things (IoT) devices and the vast expansion of the cyber attack surface that those devices create, National Security Agency (NSA) IoT Enterprise Functional Team Lead Arlene Santos is emphasizing the importance of the IoT Cybersecurity Improvement Act reintroduced in Congress last month as way to address the cybersecurity concerns posed by rapid IoT device growth. […]

Boosting the use of cloud services may be the answer to expanding implementation of zero-trust models of cybersecurity across Federal agencies and departments, Education Department CISO Steven Hernandez said at an ACT-IAC meeting today. […]

The U.S. Army is partnering with the Air Force to use the Common Cloud Environment as part of the Army’s Cloud Strategic Framework, said Thomas Sasala, the Army’s chief data officer, on April 9. […]

The Small Business Administration Office of the Inspector General, or SBA OIG, raised concerns about oversight of the agency’s cloud migration, contracts with cloud providers, and ability to move data to other services in a report released April 9. […]

As part of an aggressive cloud migration plan, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is aiming to move 350 apps – or about half the department’s portfolio – to the cloud by 2024, said VA CIO James Gfrerer today at ACT-IAC’s Health Innovation Day 2019. […]

For agencies looking at a multi-cloud strategy, managing different vendors and gaining expertise in different clouds is key to take advantage of the nuanced differences and prevent cloud sprawl, said Sanjay Gupta, chief technology officer for the Small Business Administration (SBA). […]

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) gave a 12-month provisional authorization to the Project Host Federal Private Cloud (PJHFPC) on April 1. PJHFPC is a platform as a service private cloud that hosts Impact Level 5 (IL5) controlled unclassified information data, and it has systems and services that manage access control, authentication, auditing, monitoring, scanning, […]

Moving data into the cloud has been a key component to building more secure and interoperable healthcare data and systems, and panelists showcased how that move has both empowered patients and driven precision medicine research forward at today’s CXO Health IT Modernization Tech Forum. […]

One of the major wrinkles to iron out in the Federal government’s move to the cloud has been security. Concerns regarding security have prompted some agencies to move cautiously, and the government to create whole programs dedicated to ensuring it. But cloud also provides some security advantages, which the Department of Defense (DoD) is taking advantage of to provide services to warfighters and small-business contractors. […]

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) rolled out a new cloud-based storage system, milDrive, this month, which the agency said make accessing and sharing its information more secure, flexible, and reliable. […]

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) secretary outlined how it will use its proposed budget to improve veteran healthcare and modernize its largely outdated information technology (IT) systems at a hearing today before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies. […]

Missouri University of Science and Technology (S&T) has pioneered a graduate school program that emphasizes data science, cyber-physical, and cybersecurity research – particularly on the front of cloud computing – to a degree that has earned it Federal recognition. […]

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of Inspector General (OIG) believes that the agency violated the Federal Records Act when it destroyed an employee’s notes that document a security report of EPA’s cloud service provider. […]

A new analysis from Apptio, a maker of technology business management (TBM) software as a service applications, finds that Federal agencies were on average spending less than two percent of their IT budgets on cloud services in fiscal year 2018, lagging far behind a reported spend rate for the private sector. […]

The question of the best way for transitioning to cloud infrastructures is a big one for Federal agencies. One approach to solve this issue is a slow, measured migration. Another approach is a more dramatic transformation in a shorter period that might be painful, but allows agencies to reap the benefits of cloud migration much sooner. The best approach for agencies to successfully transition depends on the agency itself, its mission, and what officials are looking to achieve. […]

Controlling cloud costs in today’s hybrid and multi-cloud environments can be a challenge for many Federal technology managers after a migration or cloud-native application deployment. There are so many variables to consider, from operational to contracts and licensing issues, that if the process is not well managed costs can spiral out of control. […]

The General Services Administration announced Thursday that they are adding a category for cloud-oriented IT professional services to IT Schedule 70 under the Cloud Special Item Number (SIN), as well as draft updates for existing software SINs. […]

The U.S. cloud computing economy tripled in size from 2002 to 2017, and added $214 billion to the U.S. gross domestic product in 2017, according to an Internet Association (IA) report released Tuesday. […]

The move by government organizations to public cloud infrastructure is often motivated by a desire to provide better services to citizens, but an academic piece warns about the need to maintain public access to open data in the cloud. […]

As Federal technology managers increasingly operate in a hybrid, multi-cloud world, having a holistic view of their agency’s application landscape and architecture will help in mapping the right workload to the right type of cloud deployment. […]

Defense Department (DoD) officials voiced sometimes conflicting ideas today about how the agency should migrate legacy systems to the cloud. […]

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a request for information (RFI) on Tuesday asking for support in moving systems to the cloud, optimizing its remaining enterprise data center, and gathering comment on the department’s plan. The deadline to respond is March 20. […]