AT&T Storage as a Service receives FedRAMP approval: AT&T’s Storage as a Service (STaaS) offering is the latest to make its way through the FedRAMP authorization process. This approval marks the sixth conditional authorization granted via FedRAMP for the offering of cloud services to the federal government and it is now available for agencies to leverage. Veris Group, one of the FedRAMP approved third-party assessment organizations acted as the 3PAO. For more see FedRAMP’s website.
GSA Awards Contract for Outsourced 3PAO Approval Process: In other FedRAMP news, GAO has awarded the Association for Laboratory Accreditation (A2LA) with the responsibility for reviewing and approving new 3PAOs. The contract is the result of GSA’s RFP earlier this year which sought to outsource the process by which 3PAOs were approved, freeing up GSA resources to focus on other aspects of the FedRAMP process. The program stopped accepting new applications for 3PAOs in the spring, and presumably this award will bring that to an end. At present there are 22 GSA approved 3PAOs and reportedly more than 50 potential cloud service providers in the FedRAMP approval pipeline. FCW has a story.
Cloud Spending Could Reach $7.7 billion by 2017: IDC Government Insights has a new report out saying that government spending on cloud computing could reach $7.7 billion by 2017, more than four times what is expected in 2014. This is good news for cloud computing contractors who have watched closely as government technology spending has leveled off significantly in recent years. See the full report here.
Army Awards ITES-2 to Six Firms: On July 19th the Army announced that it had awarded a $500 million IDIQ contract for hardware, software and related services to six companies – Dell Federal Systems, IBM, Unicom Government, CDW-G, Iron Bow Technologies and World Wide Technology – under the product portion of the Information Technology Enterprise Solution-2 (ITES-2) contract. These companies will now compete for task orders under the multi award contract. This award replaces the original ITES which was responsible for $4.6 billion in task orders over its lifetime. FCW has a brief recap.
Shutdown Talk Begins on Capitol Hill: With a little more than two months to go before the beginning of the new fiscal year and not a single appropriations bill signed into law, talk of a government shutdown has begun on Capitol Hill. This year, the talk seems to be centering around the fight over funding of the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) with some members of the Senate believing that one way to prevent any funds from going to implement the health care program would be to hold up funding for the continuing resolution which is likely to be needed to keep the government open beyond the end of this fiscal year. I am sure we will hear more about this as we get closer to the September 30th deadline. For now, see what David Hawkings at Roll Call has to say about it.
Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG. Sign up for the Public Sector Innovation Roundup email newsletter for weekly updates.