Oki Mek, senior adviser to the CIO at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), on Feb. 20 discussed the agency’s current effort to draft a cloud strategy, and the importance of going forward with a unified strategy that guides the entire organization. […]

A senior General Services Administration (GSA) official said today the agency is supportive of the primary aims of a new report recommending steps to modernize the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), which provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. […]

The Intelligence Community (IC) will be moving towards a Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) strategy and a Hybrid Compute Initiative (HCI), IC CIO John Sherman said today. […]

A MeriTalk survey of 175 milCloud® 2.0 mission partners shows that while 86 percent believe migrating to milCloud® 2.0 will have a positive impact on Department of Defense (DoD) missions, just 21 percent of them are in the process of migrating to the service – pointing to an opportunity for additional training and resources to accelerate migration. […]

The U.S. Court of Federal Claims issued an order today that temporarily halts any new work on the Defense Department’s (DoD) Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud services contract, according to numerous reports. The court ordered the temporary halt until it finishes sorting out a protest that was brought last year by Amazon Web Services […]

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is updating its indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract strategy, agency officials said today. […]

Chezian Sivagnanam, chief enterprise architect at the National Science Foundation (NSF), stressed the importance of moving the Federal government to cloud-native applications, during a presentation Feb. 12 at an event organized by GovLoop and Red Hat. […]

The Small Business Administration (SBA) has successfully deployed a cloud environment to track all IT systems on its network, per CTO Sanjay Gupta during a Feb. 12 RedHat virtual summit. […]

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has issued a draft request for proposal (RFP) for its Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) contract, according to a report by Nextgov. […]

As both the private and public sectors continue to move to the cloud, they must ensure that cybersecurity is at the forefront of that transition. In a report released today, Palo Alto Networks found that “vulnerabilities in the development of cloud infrastructure are creating significant security risks.” […]

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is seeking out new cloud services to help it meet its 2022 goal to transition to a full electronic recordkeeping environment. […]

Two major government IT policy developments over the past year are working to drive the pace and sophistication of Federal cloud-based network adoption – and the advent of Cloud Ready Networks (CRN) that are designed to accommodate those policy trends and the long-term benefits they envision. […]

Federal healthcare agencies are pushing forward on modernizing their IT systems with the goal of providing better care and health services for patients, but the journey is anything but short, or easy. […]

IBM announced Jan. 30 that Arvind Krishna will lead the company when current CEO and President Virginia Rometty steps down in April. […]

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt urged lawmakers on Jan. 29 to consider action on several steps the U.S. could take to extend its technological leadership in the world and fend off tech competition from China, including expanding a National Science Foundation (NSF) program to connect agency-sponsored researchers to more cloud computing resources. […]

ThunderCat Technology has been doing business and providing IT solutions for the Federal government for over 10 years, specializing in cloud, cybersecurity, DevOps, data infrastructure, and so much more. MeriTalk sat down with ThunderCat’s Senior Cloud Architect Randy Pierce to get his insights and thoughts on where hybrid and multi-cloud environments are headed in 2020. […]

As Federal agencies continue the long march away from on-premise networks to the world of cloud and SaaS, the payoff of that migration remains evident, as do a daunting range of complexities that come with the new network architectures. MeriTalk sat down with two Cisco veterans – Distinguished Architect Craig Hill, and Systems Architect Chris Hocker – to talk about cloud ready networks and how Federal agencies can best approach the network architectures necessary to realize the full potential of the cloud paradigm. […]

The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Countering Weapon of Mass Destruction Acquisition Division (CWMD) is seeking cloud software engineering services to help with its mission of combating the use of WMDs. […]

In a short note on its website, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) encouraged cloud administrators and users to review the National Security Agency’s (NSA) Jan. 22 guidance on mitigating cloud vulnerabilities. […]

Secretary of Defense Mike Esper said today that Department of Defense (DoD) partnerships with the private sector are vital to the Pentagon’s aim to remain the global leader in emerging defense technologies. […]

According to the Defense Department (DoD) Deputy CIO for Information Enterprise Peter Ranks, cloud computing is the foundation to unlock the full potential of technological advances for the department. […]

Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) CIO James Gfrerer said today that the agency is “in place to move about half of our portfolio … into our enterprise cloud by 2024.” […]

Federal policymakers have spent an exceptionally busy couple of years staking out new rules – think Federal Data Strategy, Cloud Smart, TIC 3.0, the National AI Initiative, among others – that will lead the government-wide IT enterprise forward into the next decade. […]

In establishing an agency’s cloud transformation, the General Services Administration (GSA) can provide lessons in setting up the transition. […]

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released volume one of its draft Cloud Interface Reference Architecture for the National Cybersecurity Protection System (NCPS) on December 12, aimed at enabling greater cloud adoption while keeping security concerns at the forefront. […]

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced new cloud contracts with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft to provide easier access to environmental data sets. […]

The Department of Defense (DoD) began development of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) environment on Dec. 11, according to an article on the agency’s website. […]

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) saw a spike in authorizations from 2017 to 2019, but the program is still not used in all cloud acquisitions and agencies have gaps in implementing controls, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released December 12. […]

The Defense Digital Service (DDS) is seeking out a cloud-hosted Software as a Service (SaaS) to “improve, streamline, and automate its hiring process,” according to a Dec. 9 request for information (RFI). […]

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched a new mobile application called the CURE ID that will allow the clinical community to report uses of existing drugs for infectious diseases that may prove difficult to treat. […]