Earlier this week, SIIA member Deltek hosted a Federal Executive Briefing on The Ins and Outs of FedRAMP. The event, attended by nearly 100 people featured Kathy Conrad from GSA’s Office of Citizen Services, David DeVries, the Deputy CIO at DOD, and Paul Nguyen, VP of Cyber Solutions at Knowledge Consulting Group, one of the first FedRAMP approved 3PAOs. The event was moderated by Kevin Plexico of Deltek. I believe the event marked the first time since the 3PAOs were announced that anyone has actually heard from any one of them publically. Overall, I think the interaction was helpful to business and the government. According to the discussion, GSA has received 20 applications to date from cloud service providers (CSPs) via FedRAMP, all seeking to go through formal JAB approval process. They also now have 10 accredited 3PAOs, with Coalfire having been added to the list after the first round. Clearly FedRAMP is moving forward and progress is being made but based on the questions that were being asked at this event, and those that were raised the week prior in the SIIA PSIG Roundtable, there are still a lot of questions that need to be answered.
Also this week, SIIA member IBM hosted an event on Capitol Hill for policymakers on how they can leverage big data to save money and address societal challenges. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Rep. Steve Womack (R-AR) both participated along with speakers from IBM. For more see the related blog post from June 27th.
In related news, the Washington Post had a good story this week about the savings and security benefits that can be achieved with a shift to cloud based email, such as that provided by Google Apps for Government.
Lastly, this week, we heard reports from EPA that it hopes to be 80% cloud based by 2015, leveraging a 3 year, $15m IaaS contract recently awarded to CGI. EPA is building a hybrid cloud environment in its National Computing Center in Research Triangle Park, N.C.and CGI will provide server hosting, virtualization, and other services and help move the EPA’s applications to the cloud.
Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.