GSA nearing first FedRAMP approvals: As announced earlier this year, GSA is striving to complete the first round of applications by CSPs under the FedRAMP program by year end. To date, we haven’t heard anything to lead us to believe that they will miss this self-imposed deadline. GSA is expected to grant provisional authority to three cloud service providers in the first round and the expectation is they’ll move expeditiously with other CSP approvals after the first of the year. SIIA will be watching this process closely and continues to encourage GSA to move as many CSPs through the process as quickly as possible so that government agencies looking to procure cloud services will have a wide array of options. See Fierce Government IT for more.
Mobile still a hot topic for government: The CIO Council released a report this week detailing federal agency use of mobile technologies and making recommendations that aim to reduce the cost of secure mobile technologies, as directed in the White House’s Digital Government Strategy. The report, which can be accessed here, is the result of a collaborative inter-agency effort that involved almost two dozen Federal departments and agencies and was led by the Information Security and Identity Management Committee (ISIMC) of the Federal CIO Council.
Government IT priorities are changing but legacy systems still pull the money: A recent report from GAO shows that despite the efforts of the Obama Administration to focus most of its information technology attention on promoting the adoption of innovative new technologies and reducing the overall cost of IT, legacy systems still account for the vast majority of the federal government’s IT spending. According to the GAO report, in FY2011, 26 federal agencies spent $79 billion on IT with $54 billion or nearly 70% going to maintain existing systems. This is the challenge to modernizing our IT infrastructure that will need to be addressed as agency budgets are further restrained in the coming months and years. FCW has more.
Carper officially named Chairman of Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC): The Senate Democratic Steering Committee announced on Wednesday that Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE) has officially been named Chairman of HSGAC, taking over for Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) who retired. Carper was Chairman of the panel’s Federal Financial Management Subcommittee and has been a strong advocate for government reform over his years in the Senate. The Hill reports.
Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.

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
Keith Kupferschmid is General Counsel and SVP, Intellectual Property Policy & Enforcement at SIIA.
Ken Wasch is President of SIIA.
Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.