Digital Discourse / Archives for FedRAMP

Save the Date for Public Sector Innovation Summit, February 2014

October 1, 2013 By

The Software & Information Industry Association, the principal trade association for the software and digital content industries, today announced the Public Sector Innovation Summit, formerly CloudGOV, will take place February 13th in Washington DC.  Formerly Cloud/GOV, the Public Sector Innovation Summit is the premier government IT conference, bringing leading ISVs, cloud service providers, systems integrators and IT services companies together with government decision-makers to learn how innovation is changing the public sector IT market.

When: February 13, 2014
Where: The Westin, Washington DC
Who: ISVs, cloud service providers, systems integrators, IT services companies, and Government decision makers

“The landscape of federal agencies continues to change as they transition to data-driven cloud computing,” says Rhianna Collier, Vice President of the SIIA Software Division. “SIIA’s Public Sector Innovation Summit will provide critical insight and intelligence into the government’s movement towards cloud platforms and services and how ISVs can capitalize on this transition.”

For sponsorship inquiries, please contact Rhianna Collier at rcollier@siia.net or +1.408.884.3834 or Mike Hettinger at mhettinger@siia.net or +1.202.789.4456..

Share|
Filed Under: Public Sector Innovation Summit, Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

Public Sector Innovation Roundup

August 30, 2013 By

OASIS Protest Dropped: US Falcon, one of two companies that had protested the RFP for GSA’s $60 billion OASIS GWAC said this week that the issue on which the protest had been based — essentially how past performance would be evaluated for companies that had changed ownership — had been resolved and the protest withdraw. The other OASIS protest, filed by AAIC, was ordered to move ahead last week under the original schedule, when a GSA official rejected the Office of General Counsel’s motion to dismiss. FCW has a full report.

FedRAMP Adds Akamai Content Delivery to list of approved CSPs: FedRAMP announced this week that it had added another approved CSP to the FedRAMP repository, Akamai Content Delivery Services. This approval brings the number of FedRAMP approved CSPs to eight. Akamai’s globally distributed intelligent platform providing delivery benefits for all content types, including HTML, images, dynamic Web 2.0, SSL, live and on-demand streaming media is now available for agencies to leverage. Knowledge Consulting Group (KCG) acted as the 3PAO. More info.

Amazon to be major player in Interior cloud contract: While Amazon Web Services was not included as a prime contract holder in the recently awarded $10 billion foundation cloud hosting services contract at the Department of Interior they are still expected to be a major player. According to this report in FCW, AWS is part of the proposed contract offerings of no fewer than five of the 10 contract awardees, with two of the awardees — Aquilent and Smartronix — being premier AWS partners.

U.S. to hit debt ceiling in mid-October: The Department of Treasury announced this week that it had exhausted the extraordinary measures it has been using to delay hitting the debt ceiling and said that the Congress will need to increase the borrowing limit by mid-October or risk the U.S. government defaulting on its financial obligations. This sets up an expected fight between Congress and the Obama Administration over spending cuts and the need to increase the borrowing limit and will come quickly on the heels of Congress having to address the annual appropriations bills and/or the need for a Continuing Resolution to keep the government running past September 30th. This is sure to get interesting with Congress only in session for nine legislative days in September. Roll Call has a report.

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.

Share|
Filed Under: Policy, PSIG Tagged With: , , ,

Public Sector Innovation Roundup: GSA to stop accepting 3PAO applications, NASA to move forward with SEWP V, and more

March 7, 2013 By

GSA to stop accepting applications for 3PAOs: As we reported two weeks ago, GSA is looking to privatize the process by which FedRAMP third party assessors get certified and has an active RFI on the street to bring in a private sector entity to manage this process. This week, to take this process a step further, GSA announced that it would no longer be accepting applications from potential 3PAOs beginning on March 25th. They will continue to process those applications already in the pipeline so there is the potential for additional 3PAO approvals before the government’s role in the process comes to a close. The private sector alternative to GSA as the accreditor of 3PAOs is not expected to be up and running until the fall. Any reader of this blog knows this is a big issue for SIIA and our members as we have long been concerned about the bandwidth of the FedRAMP program. We were happy to weigh in as part of this NextGov story

NASA to move forward with SEWP V: NASA announced this week that it is moving ahead with a new 7 year, $14 billion information technology contract known as SEWP (pronounced soup) V. The agency is planning an industry day for March 11th at the Greenbelt Marriott and expects to have the RFP out by this summer, with a targeted award date of May, 2014. SEWP V is the fifth in a line of big NASA IT contracts which began in 1993 and was awarded most recently in 2007, with a total value of $5.6 billion. Although NASA is the awarding agency, SEWP is open to all federal agencies wishing to leverage it for IT purchases and is mandatory at the Department of Veterans Affairs. NextGov has a full report.

House passes FY2013 Continuing Resolution: This week, the House passed a $982 billion continuing resolution to fund the government through the end of FY2013. The bill will be considered by the Senate next week, with the hope of avoiding a government shutdown when the current funding bill expires on March 27th. The House passed bill restored some $10 billion to DOD that was cut as a result of the now one-week old sequester, but kept in place the two-year pay freeze on federal employees. Federal News Radio has more.

Debate on “outsourcing” heats up: Last month, OFPP asked for formal comments on the issue of comparing the cost of performance by government employees to their private sector counterparts. This week the debate took to a public forum as industry gathered with OFPP to air concerns about how insourcing / outsourcing have been handled in the past via the A-76 process as well as to highlight concerns about how this process may work going forward. FCW has a report.

OMB Gets New Director: President Obama nominated former Walmart Foundation executive Sylvia Matthews Burwell as the new Director of OMB this week, filling the spot at OMB vacated by now- Treasury Secretary Jack Lew over a year ago. Burwell most recently served as President of the Walmart Foundation and she has prior experience at OMB, having been Deputy Director of OMB during the Clinton Administration. FCW has more on Burwell’s nomination.

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.

Share|
Filed Under: PSIG Tagged With: , ,

Webinar: 2013 Federal IT Predictions

February 4, 2013 By

Webinar Description
The past several years have brought a great deal of change to the federal IT market, and 2013 will be no exception. One thing is for sure, 2013 will bring a convergence of issues impacting agencies from budget uncertainty, IT mandates and acquisition policies, to oversight and human capital issues. With all of those issues at hand, what will be the top federal IT predictions for 2013? Listen to this pre-recorded webcast to find out.

Panelists:
Susie Adams
Federal Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft

Kevin Plexico
Vice President Information Solutions, Deltek

Mike Binko
President and CEO, kloudtrack

Share|
Filed Under: Public Sector Innovation Summit, Software Tagged With: , , ,

SIIA & INPUT Webinar: Federal Cloud Computing Initiative Update

February 2, 2011 By

Opening Presentation by INPUT: “Five Indicators That Cloud Computing is Here to Stay”
Presenter:
Deniece Peterson, Manager, Industry Analysis, INPUT

Vendor Panel
Moderator:
Michael Binko, President & CEO, kloudtrack
Panelists:
Kevin Jackson, Cloud Evangelist and Engineering Fellow, NJVC
Nick Hoover, Senior Editor, InformationWeek
Robert O. Ames, Director and Deputy CTO, IBM Federal

Share|
Filed Under: All About the Cloud, Cloud Computing, Government, Public Sector Innovation Summit, Software, Software Events Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

FedRAMP is key to “Cloud First” Federal policy; security controls pose a hurdle

January 18, 2011 By

Without question, the Federal Government has accurately identified cloud computing as a great opportunity for significant cost savings, flexibility, fast deployment and lower risk of project failure across all agencies.  In December 2010, U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra unveiled the 25 Point Implementation Plan To Reform Federal Information Technology Management, which lays out an 18-month execution strategy to improve Government efficiency, effectiveness, and service delivery.

One of the key components of the plan is the launch of a “Cloud First” policy, where each agency CIO will be required to begin migration of multiple services to the cloud in the next 12-18 months.  Central to the effort to provide a standard approach to Assessing and Authorizing (A&A) cloud computing services and products is FedRAMP (the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program), a program that proposes to provide joint authorizations and continuous monitoring for government and commercial cloud computing systems intended for multi-agency use.

While it’s a laudable goal to streamline and simplify cloud computing security risk assessment controls across agencies and to ease the certification process, the most recent draft FedRAMP still suffers from being an impractical high-bar approach to achieve the “approve once and use often” goal for cloud computing implementation across agencies.  With the clock ticking on the aggressive “Cloud First” implementation timeline, SIIA submitted comments highlighting the various challenges posed by the current proposal.  Fortunately, Vivek Kundra and key Federal IT leaders continue to demonstrate a dogged determination to make the cloud first policy a success, so hopefully there’s still time to fix FedRAMP and begin migrating to the cloud.

To that end, SIIA’s Cloud/gov conference couldn’t come at a better time this year, as agency CIOs assess the opportunities and challenges presented by this new policy.  On February  17th, the conference will provide a timely opportunity to hear from Federal IT leaders from GSA, NIST and NASA, and talk with colleagues from other agencies about the opportunities and challenges presented by the new Cloud First policy.

For more SIIA policy updates, subscribe to the Digital Policy Roundup, SIIA’s weekly policy email newsletter.

Share|
Filed Under: Cloud Computing, Digital Policy Roundup, Policy Tagged With: , , , ,

GSA Presentation on the Federal Cloud Computing Initiative

June 18, 2010 By

United States Government is the world’s largest consumer of information technology, spending over $76 billion annually on more than 10,000 different systems. In September 2009, the Federal Government launched the Cloud Computing Initiative and Apps.gov to streamline application adoption of cloud computing at Federal agencies. Since that time, Apps.gov has served as the Federal agency storefront for approved cloud computing applications, including business applications, cloud services, productivity apps and social media software.

While these steps have helped to speed-up Federal deployment of cloud computing, many small and medium-sized companies are still struggling to understand and capitalize on the opportunities presented by the Government’s embrace of cloud computing. In this webinar Matthew Goodrich, Project Manager for FedRAMP and Apps.gov, will outline the Cloud Computing strategy, how companies can get on the GSA schedule and participate via Apps.gov, as well as additional initiatives underway to further streamline the difficult procurement process that should make it easier for small and medium-sized companies to participate.

In this webinar you will hear from the GSA as they outline their Cloud Computing strategy, including Apps.gov, getting on the GSA schedule and more.

Speaker:
Matthew Goodrich
Project Manager, FedRAMP and Apps.gov
General Services Administration

Moderator:
Morris Panner
Chief Executive Officer
TownFlier, Inc.

To advance the slides, use the arrow buttons below.

Share|
Filed Under: Cloud Computing, Cloud Computing: Education, Government, Security, Software Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
« Older Posts