The General Services Administration (GSA) released a request for information detailing part of the Federal Acquisition Service’s (FAS’) new CIO Modernization and Enterprise Transformation contract–named COMET for short–and highlighted the guiding principles of cloud-native solutions, SecDevOps, and data management. […]

A draft of the new Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) policy released Monday reorients the focus of DCOI toward optimization–rather than data center consolidations and closures–and revises metrics for the program. […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is looking to use cloud services to speed up the agency’s scientific discoveries and offer researchers more tools through a new program named Exploring Clouds for Acceleration of Science, or E-CAS. […]

The State Department is standing up a cloud program office and taking the opportunity to modernize both systems across the department, according to Brian Merrick, deputy director of cloud program management at the State Department. […]

Diane Greene, CEO of Google Cloud, announced Friday that she will be leaving her post in early 2019–a specific date was not mentioned. […]

Join Federal IT leaders at the 2019 ServiceNow Federal Summit on March 4 as we map the path to drive innovation forward and deliver improved citizen service at lower cost. Don’t miss plenary sessions with IT leaders on the front lines, and break outs focused on streamlining IT service management, prioritizing and responding to cyber threats faster, transforming Federal HR, improving customer service management, and much more. […]

The General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services Division on Nov. 9 issued a request for information (RFI) in connection with a market survey of firms that would provide “professional services” in support of the cloud.gov platform. […]

The White House is looking to finalize its new Cloud Smart policy following the release of a draft at the end of September. Agencies and other stakeholders have been given just over a month to express how to make improvements to the new policy. […]

Leveraging the cloud is key to the success of new programs and modernization efforts at the Pentagon, said Department of Defense CIO Dana Deasy and Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Chief Vice Admiral Nancy Norton during DISA’s Forecast to Industry conference on Monday. […]

Hybrid clouds can be an integral part of government agencies’ information technology modernization strategies by helping to provide consistency across on-premise and public cloud platforms to ease migration, integration, and operation across the platforms. […]

The Professional Services Council told Federal CIO Suzette Kent in an Oct. 24 letter in response to the Office of Management and Budget’s request for comments on the 2018 Federal Cloud Computing Strategy that it “supports efforts to build on the 2011 Federal Cloud Computing Strategy, the ‘Cloud First’ policy, to help Federal agencies leverage commercial solutions to provide the best services at best value to the American people.” […]

Leaders at defense and intelligence agencies have a unique challenge–how to build a cloud environment that is secure, reliable, and delivers a wide variety of services. […]

Current and retired Defense Department IT officials today discussed cost and opportunity implications of further cloud adoption by the military and potential payoffs including acceleration of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. […]

Data from the Federal government’s IT Dashboard website appear to indicate that Federal CFO Act agencies have made some progress but are still more than 1,000 data centers short of their intended closure goals for 2020 under the Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI). […]

Federal Deputy CIO Margie Graves said today that the forthcoming update to the Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) Initiative is coming “extraordinarily soon.” With the update, there seems to be an acknowledgment that the former ways of TIC–now over a decade old–will be yielding, including the TIC architecture often seen as expensive and inflexible to cloud technologies. […]

Cloud-based agility promises Federal agencies ease, efficiency, and transparency, but the road to the promised land is anything but linear. The reason for gridlock? Network complexity delays progress, and those in the front seat struggle to maintain momentum while shifting to cloud. […]

As Federal agencies continue to amass vast amounts of data, it’s inevitable that some portion of it won’t hold a ton of value to an agency’s mission. It could be a simple email to schedule your next meeting, or it could be notes scribbled on a Word document and stashed on an agency server. Outside of its immediate use at that point in time, there’s not a strong need to store it in perpetuity. […]

A new report from MeriTalk finds that Federal legacy network infrastructure may be struggling to keep pace with the growing demands of agency cloud migrations, next-generation technology, and the continued push to modernize IT systems. […]

If Federal agencies want to succeed in the cloud, they must first tackle the chaos and complexity of current legacy networks. What impact are today’s network challenges having on government cloud adoption? Where are agencies successfully prioritizing modernization, and where are they falling behind? […]

Later this month government and private sector leaders will gather for a frank discussion about redefining government cybersecurity. The conversation could hardly be more timely: the Federal government is facing seemingly endless challenges, from evolving threats and aging legacy systems to budget constraints and workforce gaps. […]

Three Senate Democrats asked Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Joseph Simons in an Oct. 10 letter to open an investigation into Google’s disclosure earlier this week that it discovered and patched in March a vulnerability in its Google+ social media platform that may have exposed profile data on up to 500,000 accounts, but did not inform users of the vulnerability in a timely way. […]

The Federal government is seeing progress in seven out of 10 key cybersecurity metrics that are being tracked quarterly as part of the President’s Management Agenda (PMA), Federal CIO Suzette Kent said today. […]

The hype around cloud services in the Federal government could lead to substantial increases in adoption over the next year, according to new research conducted by MeriTalk. […]

Department of Defense CIO Dana Deasy described how DoD is approaching cloud services, including the Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative (JEDI), and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies during an interview on “Government Matters” on Sunday. […]

Government is getting cloud smart. We know that cloud platforms are driving digital transformation and modernization across agencies. But they’re also allowing government to rethink how it delivers services, mission requirements, and innovation. […]

Locked in our technology siloes, the word “cloud” has become common vernacular. Working in IT, we know what it means, and we know at this point the kind of potential cloud computing unlocks. It’s not a big step to say that it will underpin technological innovation for the foreseeable future. […]

Sanjay Gupta, chief technology officer at the Small Business Administration (SBA), discussed last week how his agency has aggressively moved to the cloud while keeping security at the forefront with new pilots to meet Federal requirements. […]

As the Federal government shifts its cloud strategy from “Cloud First” to “Cloud Smart,” IT leaders at the Infor Government Forum described how their previous cloud migration efforts have shifted their agencies’ mindsets and brought new successes to their department. […]

The Office of Management and Budget today released a draft of its new Cloud Smart strategy, marking the first update to White House guidance on Federal agency cloud adoption since 2011. With the new draft strategy the administration has broadly highlighted three areas–security, procurement, and workforce–as the foundational areas of the strategy and where it feels that updated guidance is most necessary. […]

As Federal agencies migrate applications to the cloud, data integration can be a major stumbling block that prevents them from reaping the benefits of cloud services. While agencies are putting more applications in cloud environments, often the underlying technologies connecting these applications are still on-premise. As a result, information technology teams must spend time provisioning and maintaining their middleware infrastructure to avoid performance bottlenecks. […]