The merger of the two leading FedRAMP third-party assessment organizations is raising significant concerns about the ability of small and midsized businesses to compete for Federal cloud contracts. Coalfire, the No. 2 FedRAMP 3PAO, announced last month it has acquired Veris Group, the leading provider of the mandatory security assessments for cloud service providers that want to sell their products and services to Federal agencies. […]

A new partnership between George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and Ligado Networks is hoping to demonstrate the feasibility of delivering NOAA real-time weather data to users across the country at a lower cost, using a cloud-based network. […]

Education on how Federal programs can best use the cloud is going to pick up this year as agencies continue the transition away from legacy IT, according to Rob Morrow, public sector chief technology officer at Cloudera. […]

Nearly all Federal government employees are finding that slow, buggy, and sluggishly repaired applications have a negative impact on the productivity of their agency, according to a recent survey released by Riverbed. […]

Security measures in cloud adoption will be the fastest growing service in which the government invests in 2017, according to Tom Ruff, vice president of Public Sector America’s and Latin American Markets for Akamai Technologies. […]

Federal agencies consider cloud computing, mobility, and big data to be the most important technologies to their organizations, according to Dell EMC’s survey released Wednesday. […]

The need for mobility and security has propelled cloud adoption forward, but agencies are still trying to figure out what to do with it, according to Sonu Singh, president and chief executive officer of 1901 Group. “IT in the government is going to change more in the next five years than the past 30 years,” Singh said at MeriTalk’s Cloud Connect 2016 event on Nov. 2 in Washington, D.C. […]

The speed of government cloud adoption and authorization is both good and bad, depending on which agency is asked, according to panelists at Dell EMC World. “Some of the slowness works to our advantage,” said Annette Moore, acting director and acting CIO at the NASA Johnson Space Center. “In instances it certainly does not.” […]

When the cloud houses many single applications that aren’t designed to work with other servers, it can indicate communication problems within government agencies. The Small Business Administration uses the same application on two different cloud networks. “Two offices that never talk to each other, they’re doing the same thing,” said Maria Roat, chief information officer at the SBA, who spoke at Cloud Connect on Nov. 2 in Washington, D.C. “The problem right now is the cloud is really siloed.” […]

The U.S. Air Force is talking to Congress about starting a multiyear, replenishable fund for cloud computing, according to Frank Konieczny, the chief technology officer of the Office of Information Dominance and chief information officer of the Office of the Secretary at the U.S. Air Force. […]

Though many agencies want to, or are mandated to, move applications onto Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) tools, Dustin Laun says that agencies should be more deliberate in determining what they need from a platform provider. “I feel the government buys off of paper and presentations, and they don’t really know how simple these things are,” said Laun, contracted senior adviser for innovation and technology at the FCC. […]

Tony Summerlin, who helped write FedRAMP, said he envisioned the program as a much quicker and sleeker version of what it is today. He says speed is one of the biggest challenges to Federal initiatives across the board, not just in the application of FedRAMP. […]

Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., called on the Department of Defense to stop being a “rogue elephant” when it comes to cloud authorization and the FedRAMP process. […]

Over the past few years, many government agencies have turned from doubting and distrusting the cloud to fully embracing its potential, according to Microsoft executives. […]

Recent cloud adoptions have enabled government agencies, both on the Federal and state and local levels, to process data much faster than before, and those cloud services are becoming easier to get, according to panelists at the Microsoft Government Cloud Forum. […]

Microsoft on Tuesday announced new advancements to its government cloud offerings, which will expand its ability to store Department of Defense data and increase the number of regions in which their data centers are available. […]

Verizon announced on Thursday the release of their Verizon Global Enterprise IT Management (GEITM) service, which is designed to provide a unified framework through which CIOs can have visibility into their entire infrastructure’s operations. […]

Cloud adopters at the Federal, State, Local, and Education (SLED) levels may be getting ahead of themselves, according to a recent survey conducted by MeriTalk. […]

MeriTalk conducted a Q&A with Tom Ruff, vice president of Public Sector America’s and Latin American Markets for Akamai Technologies, on cloud adoption. The cloud will be the topic of concern at MeriTalk’s Cloud Connect 2016: Hybridization and Hyper-Scaling event on Nov. 2. […]

Skyhigh Networks is filling the security gap in the cloud for Federal agencies with its Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) solution–providing agencies with visibility, threat protection, compliance, and data security in the cloud. […]

The Federal government, state and local governments, and higher education institutions are seeing the appeal of adopting cloud offerings in areas such as increased speed and cost savings, according to a recent MeriTalk survey titled “Destination Cloud: the Federal and SLED Cloud Journey.” […]

The Defense Information Systems Agency receives notifications for about 800 million alarms a day while providing support for 146 mission partners, and Maj. Gen. Sarah Zabel, vice director, said the agency is trying to grant all 146 partners access to the commercial cloud. […]

In the five years since the government has encouraged agencies to transition to the cloud, spending on cloud-based technologies has increased to about 9 percent, which is a good pace, according to Tom Ruff, vice president of Public Sector America at Akamai. […]

Unified Communications company collab9 is seeking to give Federal agencies both flexibility and security in communication systems through its recent FedRAMP authorization, the first of a Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) provider. […]

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is taking steps to move all 4,000 of its employees to cloud-based email. To do so, they’ve selected Unisys through a contract worth up to $11.2 million over the course of five years. […]

The General Services Administration on Tuesday released the FedRAMP Readiness Assessment Report, a template that allows cloud service providers to quickly determine whether they are ready to pursue FedRAMP authorization. […]

Intel announced its 3D XPoint technology and 3D NAND technology, which will help increase memory and storage capabilities in the cloud. […]

The General Services Administration recently launched its new big data management platform, Data to Decisions, to address and accomplish open data and transparency goals. […]

Federal agencies can now use cloud computing systems to store their most sensitive, unclassified data, through the recent release of the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program High Baseline.
“This release allows agencies to use cloud environments for high-impact data, including data that involves the protection of life and financial ruin,” said the FedRAMP announcement. […]

Taking the lead for 36 states, Utah is expected to issue a National Association of State Procurement Officials cloud computing contract in August that helps states get the best deal for equipment and software by bundling their shopping lists into a single bid. […]