As part of GSA’s FedRAMP launch, which occurred on June 6th, the SIIA Public Sector Innovation Group held an Executive Roundtable session with two of GSA’s key cloud computing executives, Matt Goodrich and Katie Lewin. The meeting, held at SIIA’s offices on Tuesday, was attended by more than 20 leading industry executives, who were pleased to have the opportunity for an open and off-the-record discussion with two of the people driving the government’s cloud computing and security certification policy. The FedRAMP program expects to approve three cloud service providers by December, 2012.
Elsewhere in government, we continue to see a move toward cloud email as a service (EaaS). In addition to recent cloud email migrations at GSA and NOAA which implemented Google Apps for Government, we had the awarding of the FAA cloud email and collaboration at the FAA to CSC, using Microsoft Office 365. The email and collaboration migration will affect 80,000 users. Additionally the Department of Labor put out an RFI earlier this week, seeking information from EaaS providers to implement cloud-based email services.
OMB is touting the success of its Digital Government Strategy, highlighting this week that the Digital Services Innovation Center, located within the General Services Administration and headed by OCSIT’s Dave McClure has started operations. Initially the office will have a small core team, focused on researching and implementing customer satisfaction measurement tools and developing a best practices guide for federal employee’s use of mobile devices.
Lastly, there continues to be increasing focus on big data analytics and its use in government. As the government continues to collect more and more information, agencies need to figure out not only how to store it effectively (this puts a strain on existing data centers), but how to leverage it for research, what to analyze and how to publish. The White House announced it was putting $200m into big data earlier this year and NIST held its first big data workshop last week. Expect more on big data and government in the coming months. Who knows, maybe there will a “Big Data First” strategy in our future.
Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.