This year’s event will feature discussions from a diverse group of influential government IT advisors, leading software executives and policymakers, including:

• Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Chairman, Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, U.S. House of Representatives
• David DeVries, Deputy CIO, Information Enterprise, U.S. Department of Defense
• Dawn Leaf, Deputy Chief Information Officer, United States Department of Labor
• Peter Tseronis, Chief Technology Officer, U.S. Department of Energy

The conference will also gather a panel of government CIOs to discuss their move to the cloud and provide advice for other federal executives with organizational concerns. Other presentations will address emerging FedRAMP-related issues, the convergence of the cloud and “big data” analytics as well as a comprehensive look at federal policy changes that could impact cloud computing in 2013. Additionally, vendors representing all segments of the public sector will highlight the latest innovations in cloud-based government IT.

For a complete schedule of events, visit http://www.siia.net/cloudgov/2013/

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.

This year’s theme is “Big Data. Bigger Opportunities.”

As part of Data Innovation Day, ITIF will host panel discussions in DC on how government agencies are using data to make government work more effectively and efficiently, as well as highlighting interesting examples of how data innovation is transforming different sectors of the economy. DMA will also host a virtual event to celebrate data-driven marketing innovation – and to engage data-driven marketers in the growing data debate that is taking shape in Washington and around the world. For more information, visit the Data Innovation Day schedule of events.

A key theme unifying the work of SIIA on behalf of its members is an increased focus on advancing the effective collection and positive use of data. It is essential that public policy recognizes that innovation and business strategies are increasingly driven by data. Importantly, data-driven innovation not only holds the promise of advancing economic opportunity and jobs, but of providing tremendous consumer and societal benefits.

With so much at stake, SIIA is committed to actively promoting the economic and social value of data-driven innovation. Our efforts will involve direct outreach to legislators, along with a White Paper that includes recommendations for policymakers and governments. Our goal is to make certain that public policy helps enable the tremendous societal and economic benefits of data-driven innovation.

With members in both technology and information services, SIIA is uniquely positioned to highlight and address the public policy issues that arise from the increased salience of data-driven innovation. We began to focus more strongly on this issue in 2012, and it will be an even more important part of our work in 2013.

SIIA also announced its general tech policy priorities for 2013, along with policy priorities in the areas of: intellectual property; public sector IT, and; education technology.

Technology Policy Priorities

• Promote and enable the economic and social value of data-driven innovation, including through a White Paper with recommendations for policymakers and governments.
• Actively support voluntary, enforceable codes of conduct to provide enhanced data privacy protections, and oppose legislative and regulatory proposals that lack the flexibility to accommodate rapid technological innovation.
• Promote policies around the world that facilitate cross-border data flows, and develop interoperable legal frameworks that help to advance global implementation of cloud computing.
• Promote critical cybersecurity policies, in the U.S. and around the world, that will help the public and private sectors work together to more effectively mitigate this threat, without stifling innovation.

Intellectual Property Priorities

• Protect the economic interests and creative rights of software and content publishers by responding as appropriate to the Supreme Court opinion in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons Inc. and any other cases, policies or legislation relating to the copyright law’s first sale exception/exhaustion principle that may unduly limit their ability to license and control the distribution of their software and content products
• Encourage economic growth and innovation by working for further reform of the patent system to address the ongoing problem of patent trolls, including measures to restrict asymmetric discovery burdens.
• Monitor the ICANN’s domain name expansion process with the goal of enhancing and strengthening online transparency and accountability by working to ensure that domain name and IP address Whois databases remain publicly accessible, accurate, and reliable, as key tools to combat online infringement of copyrights and trademarks, and other fraudulent or criminal acts online.
• Actively monitor for, and act upon as necessary, hearings, legislative or regulatory copyright reform proposals in the United States and abroad, such as issues relating to orphan works, library exceptions and piracy, to ensure that they advance and do not adversely affect the copyright interests of SIIA members.
• Oppose changes to the CFAA that would unduly limit the ability of SIIA members to deter and prevent unauthorized access – and access that exceeds authorized access to databases, subscription services and cloud services.
• Ensure that any international treaty relating to copyright exceptions for the blind and visually impaired that may be adopted by WIPO includes adequate safeguards to protect the copyright interests of SIIA’s publishers.

Public Sector IT Priorities

• Encourage Administration IT initiatives for federal agencies to be more open, transparent and efficient, delivering better services to citizens, while reducing the overall cost of government. Information Technology has and will continue to play a role in the Federal government’s effort to deliver better services to citizens, while reducing the overall cost of government.
• Support a continuation of the effort to move agencies to cloud, consolidate the existing data center infrastructure and better leverage government data.
• Advocate for key administration initiatives that support the overall mission of the SIIA Public Sector Innovation Group including: Cloud First, Big Data, Data Center Consolidation, Digital Government/Mobile, and FedRAMP.
• Support reasonable reform of the Federal acquisition process, which needs to change to keep pace with the rapid pace of technology.
• Intervene to support member interest in the legislative consideration of the proposal by Chairman Daryl Issa to reform federal IT acquisition, which will serve as a basis for a broader discussion around the need to improve IT acquisition to keep pace with technology in 2013.

Ed Tech Priorities

• Seek increased investment in education technology and its integration into teaching and learning, including to personalize learning for each student.
• Reform outdated regulations in favor of 21st Century e-learning policies, especially the shift from seat-time to anytime, everywhere competency-based learning.
• Support education technology research and development through government-industry partnership, not government competition with the private sector.
• Support the value of the for-profit sector in providing education products and services to public schools, agencies and institutions.
• Encourage targeted STEM education, training and other workforce development policies to meet the economy’s needs for a skilled high-tech workforce.
• Actively translate public policies, programs and regulations into actionable market intelligence for SIIA members.

Ken Wasch is President of SIIA.

DHS Releases Continuous Monitoring RFQ:  In cybersecurity news, DHS, working through GSA, released a final RFQ this week seeking bids to meet requirements  of the new Continuous Diagnostic and Mitigation program and for continuous monitoring as-a-service.  The BPA includes 15 tools and 11 task areas aimed at improving DHS’s IT security.  The BPA has an estimated value of $6 billion and responses are due January 28, 2013. Federal News Radio has the details.

PSIG Members Featured in 10^th Anniversary of the E-Gov Act Event:  This week marked the 10^th anniversary of the E-Gov Act and SIIA PSIG Members Doug Bourgeois of VMware, Mark Forman of Government Transaction Services and David Mihalchik of Google all were featured prominently in the event marking the anniversary.  Other SIIA members were included as well, including Dan Chenok of IBM and former Congressman Tom Davis, now of Deloitte.  C Span covered the event, which focused on the advances made in government technology since passage of the E-Gov Act.  See the video here.

 Appian Receives FISMA Moderate Certification from GSA:  Appian announced this week that it had received FISMA moderate certification from the General Services Administration for a major business process management application, built on Appian Cloud.  Appian Cloud is built on Amazon Web Services.  See the press release for more information.

Federal News Radio to host live chat with CBP CIO:  Our friends at Federal News Radio are hosting a live chat on January 3^rd at 11am with DHS Customs and Border Protection CIO Charlie Armstrong and are encouraging interested parties to submit questions in advance.  See the link for more details.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.

His intervention is a welcome attempt to set the record straight before these erroneous beliefs become widespread and entrenched.  It was accompanied the release of State Department white paper that dispels the misconceptions about the U.S. legal system and government access to information.

The fact is that the U.S. has a well-developed and established system to protect individual liberties from government intrusion.  We have a general distrust of a powerful government and are suspicious of anything that advances the growth of government power.  Our bias is in favor of a limited government that lets people chose their own good in their own way.  As a result we are far less tolerant of government intrusion into our private lives than other countries, and have set up a system whereby the U.S. extends privacy protections to non-U.S. citizens as well.

At the same time, the U.S. is more tolerant of the use of information for innovative and productive use by businesses than other countries, to our great advantage in the race for economic growth, business development and job creation.  Our system of protecting the individual privacy in the business context shows that this can be done while maintaining strong and effective protections for consumer privacy. This system also respects the rights of non-U.S. consumers established in other privacy regimes.

None of this means that the U.S. system is perfect.  We think that steps can be taken to improve the consumer privacy system for mobile app notifications and are actively working with the U.S. Commerce Department and other stakeholders on a voluntary code of conduct and an effective system of screen notices.  We have joined with others in the Digital Due Process Coalition to modernize the 1986 U.S. Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which needs updating to fit the realities of email and document storage in the cloud.

But the need for these reforms does not suggest that the current U.S. system is a threat to privacy or justifies a move away from cloud computing as a way to avoid government scrutiny.  Ambassador Kennard is to be commended for his strong defense of the U.S. approach to privacy in the cloud.

Mark MacCarthy, Vice President, Public Policy at SIIA, directs SIIA’s public policy initiatives in the areas of intellectual property enforcement, information privacy, cybersecurity, cloud computing and the promotion of educational technology. Follow the SIIA Public Policy team on Twitter at @SIIAPolicy

GSA pulls the plug on Apps.gov: The federal government pulled the plug on Apps.gov this week. The cloud application storefront, which was the brainchild of former Federal CIO, Vivek Kundra, was intended to provide a one-stop-shop for cloud apps for the federal government and make it easier for federal IT personnel to acquire cloud services. The initiative never took off as intended. GSA didn’t give a reason for decommissioning the initiative, but noted that everything that was available through Apps.gov, would still be available through Schedule 70. Information Week has a story.

NextGov Prime highlights procurement reform, big data: NextGov held its first-ever Prime Conference at the Ronald Reagan Building this week. The event included a keynote panel featuring Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and Rep. Gerry Connelly (D-VA), ranking member of the panel’s Technology Subcommittee, two leaders pushing an update to the 1996 Clinger-Cohen Act. The intent of the legislation, which SIIA has been tracking closely and which is expected to be introduced early in the next Congress, is to improve the speed and efficiency of federal IT purchasing. FCW has the wrap up. The event also had a heavy focus on big data and how data analytics can make the government more effective. FCW covers that angle as well.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.

“SIIA supports Chairman Leahy’s proposed Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) reform in order to address the tremendous technological advances in communications and computing technology since 1986, when the statute was passed. The legislation proposed by Sen. Leahy would create a warrant requirement for law enforcement access to remotely stored electronic content. This legislation presents a big step toward making sure that the information Americans store in the cloud receives the same level of protection as the information stored in their homes.

“SIIA commends Sen. Leahy’s Leadership on this very important issue, and we urge members of the Judiciary Committee to support the substitute manager’s amendment while opposing any amendments that would weaken the warrant requirement.”

Ken Wasch is President of SIIA.

1. Large data centers are more efficient than small and medium-sized data centers, so regardless of this looking negative at first blush, the electricity/unit of computing is less.
2. Devices themselves are using less energy especially as  desk tops and laptops give way to tablets and smartphones,
3. Cloud data centers can and will drive to renewable energy, as detailed in this report. Companies like Oracle, Adobe, and  IBM are devoting their considerable resources to sustainable computing practices, and this trend will only increase as they continue to work to make data centers more efficient and clean.

A number of voices have come out in support of cloud computing’s environmental benefits for these very reasons. The New York Times hosted quite a few on their Room for Debate page. Here is a short sampling.

Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure at Google, knows from personal experience how data centers work, operating Google’s servers, networks, and data centers. He writes on the New York Times website:

“Because of our obsession with efficiency, we’re able to help others be more efficient as well. Small and medium data centers use two-thirds of the total energy because it’s much harder to run them efficiently, so the trend of replacing on-premise servers with efficient cloud services will reduce the amount of energy used to run the same workload.”

Similarly, Jonathan Koomey, research fellow at the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford University refutes Mr. Glanz:

“Modern cloud-based data centers are much more efficient and have much higher utilization levels than standard data centers, giving them substantial economic and energy-related advantages. And the shift to mobile computing promises big efficiency gains for users as well. For example, laptop computers, which typically use a third to a fifth of the power of desktops, outsold desktops for the first time in 2009 (according to IDC data). Sales of tablets, which are even more efficient, are growing much faster than those for laptops.”

Gary Cook, the senior I.T. sector analyst for Greenpeace International’s Cool IT campaign,  also provides cautious optimism, writing:

Customers need companies to be more transparent about their energy choices so that they can understand the true environmental performance of their Internet and cloud use and make more informed choices. If given the information, people will choose a company that chooses clean energy. We can – and should – be able to feel good about our likes, tweets, photos and music, but it’s up to these companies to take the bold steps to make that possible.

Charles Babcock of Information Week summarizes the other side thusly:

“Everyone is doing a lot more computing, as the story notes. But as we do so, the amount of electricity consumed per unit of computing is going down, which the story somehow misses. Nowhere does the Times address this salient point. Instead, it concludes we are doing a lot more computing and, therefore, we are all guilty of driving environmental degradation. If you’re going to reform the world, you need to build a better soapbox than this.”

Tracy Carlin is a Communications and Public Policy Intern at SIIA. She is also a first year graduate student at Georgetown University’s Communication, Culture and Technology program where she focuses on intersections in education, video games and gender.

SIIA particularly welcomes the Commission’s focus on the use of cloud computing in government. The Commission’s encouragement of the use of cloud computing is the counterpart of the US government’s Cloud First approach.

Unfortunately, some parts of the Commission’s communication go in a direction SIIA warned against in its report to policy makers last year. In places, the communication treats cloud computing as a discrete entity that is potentially subject to specific government regulation. In reality, cloud computing is a variety of evolving business and technical developments that share only a rough similarity. NIST has described three different service models for cloud computing (Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Infrastructure as a Service); and four different deployment models (private, community, public and hybrid). There is also the enormous difference between consumer uses of cloud computing and its business uses, and within the latter, still further important differences between uses by large organizations and by small and medium sized businesses. Cloud computing is used in industries ranging from financial services, to energy to telecommunications.

The European Commission’s cloud strategy document recognizes this issue, noting that cloud computing has a “range of defining features (which make a general definition elusive)…” Despite this it goes on to propose a series of government regulations that can be effectively implemented only if there is a reasonably precise legal definition of cloud computing.

Privacy rules, security rules, intellectual property, and consumer protection rules apply when cloud computing is used, but there is no need for special privacy, security, intellectual property or consumer protection rules that apply just to cloud computing. Generalized rules, indeed, globally interoperable rules, are best suited to the global, borderless nature of cloud computing.

Some of the specific suggestions in the report are good in themselves. This is the case for example in the idea that security guidelines should be developed that take into account the special characteristics of cloud computing. But again there is no need for European regulations that mandate specific security requirements just for cloud computing. Security standards should be market-driven and global, not just European, in character

Another concern is the possible development of privacy rules just for the cloud. The Commission and the Parliament are working on a new data protection regulation that would apply across the board, but the cloud strategy suggests the development of alternative or competing privacy rules just for cloud computing.

The Commission also seems to be interested in mandating specific consumer protections such as data portability, interoperability and reversibility in standardized service level agreements. But it is a leap to jump from a concern for consumer protection to the conclusion that specific European consumer protection rules need to be incorporated into standardized terms of service. Industry groups, not European-wide regulators, are best situated to fill any perceived need for optional model contracts.

SIIA welcomes the Commission’s strategy and intends to engage in the process of working with the Commission to see that the benefits of cloud computing are fully realized in the European single market and throughout the world.

On a related note, SIIA submitted comments today to the General Services Administration (GSA) in response to the Cloud Brokerage RFI, an area that is addressed in the bill, and we encourage those comments to be considered by the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform as they look at that area of the legislation. We look forward to working with Chairman Issa and the Committee as they move forward to craft a final bill that serves to improve IT acquisition practices to the benefit of vendors and the federal government.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.