GAO Report highlights need to Leverage EA for cost savings: Earlier this week GAO issued a report highlighting the need for government agencies to better utilize enterprise architecture. GAO points out that “effective use of enterprise architecture is a hallmark of successful organizations and can be important to achieving operations and technology environments that maximize institutional mission performance and outcomes. Among other things, this includes realizing cost savings through consolidation and reuse of shared services and elimination of antiquated and redundant mission operations, enhancing information sharing through data standardization and system integration, and optimizing service delivery through streamlining and normalization of business processes and mission operations. Moreover, the use of architectures is required by the Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996 and by OMB.” See the full GAO report here.
DOT to take mission critical apps to the cloud: This week DOT announced that it is migrating mission-critical applications connected with the agency’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to the cloud. Apps to be moved to a cloud-based environment include FMCSA’s driving record database and related systems. These will be migrated to a FISMA-certified cloud data center run by Virtustream, which has partnered with OBXtek and MicroTech on the effort known as the Gateway Augmentation Project. Read more from GCN.
New report says $4.8 billion will be spent on cloud and related IT in next five years: A new report from Pike Research says spending by city governments who are under increasing pressure to do more with less, will cumulatively add up to nearly 5 billion between now and 2017. The majority of this is aimed at what the report terms smart technology, including cloud, data analytics, application development and related. See the full report here.
Cloud broker issue continues be debated: This week, Mike Hettinger, Director of the SIIA Public Sector Division was featured on In Depth with Francis Rose on Federal News Radio. The topic, what are cloud brokers and how would the concept work for the federal government? Here the interview here.
Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.