Last week the GSA FedRAMP Program Office released the latest version of the cloud computing Security Assessment Plan (SAR) template. This document is the most recent step toward the Federal governments goal of establishing FedRAMP initial operating Capability by June 2012.
The Federal Risk Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for Cloud Service Providers (CSP).
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FedRAMP Releases Updated Security Assessment Plan Templates
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Study: Cloud Computing Cuts $5.5 Billion Annually from Federal Budget
The federal government saved nearly $5.5 billion a year by moving to cloud services. But it might have saved up to $12 billion if cloud strategies were more aggressive, a survey of federal IT managers found.
The study, drawn from interviews with 108 federal CIOs and IT managers, was published by MeriTalk Cloud Computing Exchange, a community of federal government leaders focused on public-private collaboration in Washington, D.C.
The IT managers surveyed also reported spending 11 percent of their current, fiscal year 2013 budgets, or $8.7 billion, on cloud computing.
The chief impediment to implementing cloud services was security, listed by 85 percent of federal IT managers. Also of concern were agency culture, named by 38 percent of managers, and service levels, listed by 32 percent of managers.
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FedRAMP PMO Releases First Set of 3PAOs
Late today the FedRAMP Program Management Office released the first list of certified Third Party Assessment Organizations (3PAOs). These companies are accredited to perform initial and periodic assessment of cloud service provider (CSP) systems per FedRAMP requirements, provide evidence of compliance, and play an on-going role in ensuring CSPs meet requirements. FedRAMP provisional authorizations must include an assessment by an accredited 3PAO to ensure a consistent assessment process. he initial set of 3PAOs announced today are (see http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/131991):
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Compuware Brings Enterprise APM to Cloud and Big Data Applications
Compuware Corporation on Tuesday announced a deep transaction management solution for dynamic cloud and Big Data applications. The Compuware APM Spring 2012 Platform Release introduces new innovations in Compuware dynaTrace Enterprise that simplify performance optimization, operation and management of modern, dynamic applications.
These transformational application environments require a new approach to application performance management (APM) to support massively scalable architectures and dynamic, elastic resource allocation. With dynaTrace Enterprise and its patented PurePath(R) technology, EC2 and Azure cloud applications as well as Cassandra and Hadoop Big Data applications can be easily optimized and managed for greater performance and availability.
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Cloud Computing Growing on the Businesses Priority Front
A survey of small and mid-size businesses found an interest in harnessing technology to improve business efficiency.
Midsize businesses are turning to IT investments to grow their businesses and the larger the organization, the more likely it is to cite technology as having the greatest potential to increase productivity, according to a new survey of midmarket companies by Deloitte.
The study shows cloud computing emerging as an investment priority. When asked what types of investments companies were likely to make in technology, 40 of the respondents cited cloud computing. That's close to automation of business processes (46 percent) and data analytics (41 percent), according to eWEEK.
"Interestingly, there seems to be a greater recognition of the benefits of cloud computing," the report stated. "In our September 2011 survey, it was recognized as a distant fourth as a means to increase productivity. In this survey, it nearly equaled data analytics and business intelligence in terms of likely investments."
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Yottaa Closes $9 Million in Funding for Mobile, Web & Cloud Optimization
Yottaa on Tuesday announced that it has closed $9 million in Series B funding. This round of funding allows Yottaa to accelerate the delivery of affordable services that optimize, protect and monitor websites and critical web applications for any organization – in particular, for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). "At Yottaa, we optimize the web,” noted Yottaa CEO Coach Wei. “We make speed, scale and security easy and affordable to our customers for their websites and critical web applications."
Implementing Yottaa speeds web performance by up to 600 percent and improves conversions by up to 30 percent according to customer data. All existing investors, including General Catalyst Partners, Stata Venture Partners and Cambridge West Ventures returned for this round and were joined by additional undisclosed investors.
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Oracle Buys Vitrue
Oracle Wednesday said it’s buying privately held Vitrue for some unsung amount of money.
Vitrue operates a cloud-based social marketing and engagement platform that lets marketers centrally create, publish, moderate, manage, measure and report on their social marketing campaigns and activities on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+.
The six-year-old concern has picked up $33 million in funding over the years including investments from Comcast and Turner Broadcasting.
The acquisition should close this summer. Oracle said it will then add Vitrue’s products to the Oracle Cloud in the name of a unified social experience across customer interactions.
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Cloud Computing Adoption Approaching a Crucial Point
There's a "tipping point" for cloud adoption, according to the CIO at Google, and it's fast approaching.
Once that point arrives and companies enter the world of cloud computing, there's no going back – it will become the standard for IT, according to Google CIO Ben Fried.
An article in Midsize Insider takes a look at this issue and explores how midsize businesses and their IT fit into this new world of cloud computing. Is cloud adoption only meant for large-scale customers, or will it benefit "mom and pop" organizations as well? Have a look here.
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Huddle Gets $24 Million to Grow On
In the current fashion of pretty sizeable rounds, Huddle, the cloud-based enterprise content management start-up, has picked up a check for $24 million in Series C funding. That makes $38.2 million altogether.
The new capital comes from Jafco Ventures, with participation from DAG Ventures and existing investors Matrix Partners and Eden Ventures. Subrah Iyar, the founder of WebEx, and venture investor Herb Madan also kicked in.
The idea is to press its advantage. Huddle’s looking to triple its business again like it reportedly has every year since it started. Sales to the enterprise were up 5x last year and now the British firm, with co-headquarters in London and San Francisco, has opened an office in New York City.
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GoGrid Private Cloud Now Available in Amsterdam
GoGrid on Tuesday announced the availability of its Private Cloud service in the company’s newest data center in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. “We’re excited to bring our Private Cloud to Amsterdam,” stated John Keagy, CEO, GoGrid. “The new solutions make it easy for companies to create the secure environments their business requires, including full isolation of end-user infrastructure to ensure regulatory or industry compliance.”
To satisfy demand, GoGrid has created three new Private Cloud offerings to help customers worldwide take advantage of scalable compute power, virtual server images, load-balanced infrastructure, private networking, and elastic storage in a completely dedicated and secure environment—without hardware procurement or resource sharing.
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Consider Cloud Computing Services Before Your Users Do
The longer you put off providing features and services offered in the cloud, the worse off you'll be, according to an article in Network Computing.
The post by Define the Cloud's Joe Onisick offers a stark take on falling behind cloud adoption:
"Every day that goes by that IT isn't meeting the features and services offered in the cloud, users are moving there on their own. No office collaboration environment? They're on Google Docs. No file-sharing option? They're using Dropbox. No solid backup or recovery options for their laptops? Carbonite is handling it. Now your data is outside your corporate walls, outside your control and outside of compliance."
Every day that users turn to an unsanctioned IT service, it becomes harder to get them back. You can't close Pandora's box once it's opened, Onisick said. His advice on getting a handle on the situation: Don't stall on new services and the benefits of the cloud. Build the services in-house, and standardize on public cloud offerings.
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Cloud Computing: Ellison Claims He’s Over His Cloud Phobia
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a purportedly reformed cloud loather beguiled, he claimed, by the charisma of the cloud brand, may reportedly do his very first tweet come June 6 when Oracle floats all its enterprise applications out on the Oracle Cloud.
The event will put it 10 years ahead of SAP, he claimed Wednesday at the star-studded D: All Things Digital conference in California.
“For the first time you’re going to have a complete ERP and complete CRM suite on the cloud,” he said.
The difference between Oracle and other SaaS players will apparently be that Oracle’s cloud-ified apps won’t be multi-tenant. Instead Oracle means to give its clients their own virtual machine and Amazon-like specification control, preserving them from being upgraded at the convenience of the merchant.
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Dell Boomi Eases Cloud Integration with Summer 12 Release
Dell Boomi on Tuesday announced an improved cloud integration platform that helps organizations modernize, simplify and manage their changing IT environments. Dell Boomi AtomSphere Summer 12 expands application and data integration capabilities, enhances security and offers Boomi Assure, crowd-sourced regression testing. According to Rick Nucci, General Manager, Dell Boomi, “AtomSphere Summer 12 release addresses the concerns that IT leaders face when it comes to application and data integration.”
Dell Boomi AtomSphere integrates applications and data in customers’ IT environments by acting as the connection between applications, whether they reside in the cloud or on-premise. The latest release of AtomSphere helps deliver predictable service levels for real-time data transfers in the cloud by reserving cloud resources. In addition, it provides a solution to manage their security policies with improved flexibility and governance.
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Cloud Data Backup Makes Sense for Small and Midsize Businesses
With increasing data storage demands resulting from new content types – rich digital media, social media and machine-generated data – small and mid-size businesses have been challenged to incorporate sophisticated methods to back up critical company data.
For many types of small businesses, it just doesn't make sense to go out and buy all the storage hardware, software and services that were required before the advent of cloud backup, which now has a track record of about seven years.
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Implementation of Cloud Computing Solutions in Federal Agencies
(This is part 2 of the series entitled "Implementation of Cloud Computing Solutions in Federal Agencies" that first appeared on Forbes.com. This series provides the content of a whitepaper I recently authored. A copy of the complete whitepaper will be available at NJVC.com starting September 7, 2011.)
Despite the myriad benefits of cloud computing solutions, several challenges still exist. Being a young industry, there are few tools, procedures or standard data formats or service interfaces in place to guarantee data, computer application and service portability. As evidenced with the recent situation involving the services failure of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, outages can be a potential risk—and can have widespread implications for consumers of cloud services. This risk becomes even more severe if a mission-critical environment could be impacted.
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Implementation of Cloud Computing Solutions in Federal Agencies
Cloud computing is a new approach in the provisioning and consumption of information technology (IT). While technology is a crucial component, the real value of cloud computing lies in its ability to enable new capabilities or in the execution of current capabilities in more efficient and effective ways.
Although the current hype around cloud computing has focused on expected cost savings, the true value is really found in the mission and business enhancements these techniques can provide. When properly deployed, the cloud computing model provides greatly enhanced mission and business capability without a commensurate increase in resource (time, people or money) expenditures.
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Implementation of Cloud Computing Solutions in Federal Agencies: Part 4
The defense and intelligence communities are not immune to cloud computing. Arguably more than any other government agencies, their missions require a fabric of utility computing that scales on demand and enables self discovery and self-service access to secure, timely and relevant information in support of mission: individual or shared. The traditional IT model requires system engineering that binds most software to the hardware and does not provide an enterprise suite of functionality or allow for increased flexibility and a governed lifecycle of services. Designing software independence from the hardware allows an operating system, applications and data to “live” across the enterprise and is fundamental to the transformation of compute, storage and network functionality.
Defense is dealing with a $78 billion budget cut—the first since September 11, 2001—and another $100 billion in other cost-cutting measures over a five-year period commencing in FY 2012. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is directing that the budget be cut from agency administrative and structural areas (e.g., the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Network Intelligence and Information, the Business Transformation Agency, and the Joint Forces Command are in the process of being eliminated or disestablished with some essential functions transferred to other organizations with the Pentagon).
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Implementation of Cloud Computing Solutions in Federal Agencies
While the benefits and value of the federal cloud computing policy can be debated, the world’s transition to cloud computing as an integral component of any IT infrastructure cannot be denied. The prudent government executive should, therefore, heed the lessons learned from the many private industry corporations that already have miles behind them on this journey.
When identifying a potential cloud computing project, one should always count on a multi-year transition. Organizations should always use a consistent cloud opportunity identification process to reduce the risk of project failure by leveraging data from successful cloud implementations. Clients need to determine set metrics (economic, operational and service) with direct linkage to specific mission requirement(s). Use of a gate-driven cloud adoption process designed to terminate failed projects early in the project lifecycle and deliver measurable capabilities within a quick timeframe (weeks—not years) is highly recommended.
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Cloud Computing Transforming IT
One thing people can agree on is that the cloud is the most transformative information technology to come along in decades – on the same level as the rise of the personal computer or the Internet. And that means there is a lot at stake for enterprises struggling to lay down the foundations needed to support cloud operations going forward, according to a post on IT Business Edge.
It's possible to identify the key factors in successful cloud development that will encourage the cloud's transformative aspects while diminishing its disruptive ones. These include user attitudes, technologies and processes, all of which have a lot to gain and lose depending on the way cloud systems are architected and implemented, according to Arthur Cole of IT Business Edge.
"With something as complex as the cloud, it would be foolish to think that finding the optimal mix of services, infrastructure and resources would be easy," he writes, adding that pursuing the deployment, management and governance of the cloud is well worth it.
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Roger Sippl’s Back
Roger Sippl, who co-founded Informix a generation ago, then Vantive and Visigenic, all acquired after going public, is staging a comeback with new database widgetry that does real-time data integration from multiple sources in the cloud.
He’s been working on it for four years recruiting along the way 20 guys from the old days who are already rich thanks to Roger but still want to be “useful.”
Elastic Intelligence, the company he started a few years ago, is going to productize this newfangled virtual relational database technology as Connection Cloud, a real-time data connection service infrastructure and all.
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