2012 Cloud/GOV date announced: February 17, Washington D.C.
2011 Conference Highlights
- Presentations: you'll find coverage of our keynote sessions and other panels, as well as government Cloud Computing testimonials.
- Twitter Archive: follow our twitter conversation to catch many of the conference highlights.
- Media Coverage: check out the media buzz!
- Attendee List: you'll find an impressive roster of 265 federal, state and local government IT purchasers -- as well as ISVs and other industry influencers.
SAVE THE DATE
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Cloud/Gov News 
SIIA Submits Testimony to Congressional Forum on Information Technology
Tue, 15 May 2012 17:24
Last Friday, Representatives Elijah Cummings (MD) and Gerry Connelly (VA) hosted a Congressional Forum on Information Technology at the Fairfax County, Virginia Government Center to review government’s efforts to leverage innovative technology to reduce cost and improve citizen services. The forum featured testimony from Federal CIO Steven Van Roekel, as well as industry representatives including SIIA Public Sector Innovation Group Board Member, David Mihalchik of Google. SIIA was pleased to have been asked by the Members to provide testimony for the record.
SIIA’s testimony focused on the important transformative benefits of cloud computing – economic growth, choice and lower cost — and encouraged Congress to consider these when looking at cloud computing. We also highlighted the key security benefits that can be realized by implementing cloud computing, discussed the importance of the 25 Point Plan to Reform Federal IT, and explored the inter-relationship between Cloud First, FedRAMP, the Shared Services Strategy and the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative.
Overall, the interaction between Reps. Cummings and Connelly and the forum witnesses was thoughtful and successfully highlighted the issues of importance to government and industry alike as the federal government moves ahead with cloud computing. It was particularly encouraging to see these key members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee engage on an issue of such great importance to SIIA members and the federal IT industry as a whole and we applaud them for their effort.
Read the full text of SIIA’s statement.
Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.
This week in the Federal Cloud: April 30-May 4
Fri, 04 May 2012 23:39
There were a couple of expected but relatively big announcements around cloud in the federal government this week. First and foremost was the issuance of the Federal IT Shared Services Strategy on May 2nd by Federal CIO, Steve VanRoekel. The Shared Services Strategy, like the Shared-First Initiative before it, seeks to reduce the overall cost of government by eliminating duplicative IT and streamlining operations, while moving agencies to shared platforms for commodity IT (like email and storage), support IT (HR and financial management) and eventually mission IT (performance management). Under the plan, agencies have until August 31 to create their shared services roadmaps.
Also this week, we heard the first definitive date for the launching of the FedRAMP Initial Operational Capabilities (IOC), as it was publically announced that June 6th would be the date. This means, according to the FedRAMP timeline that we will see an operational program, with limited scope. We should also expect to see progress toward the official authorization/certification of CSPs, an updated Concept of Operations, and updated continuous monitoring guidance. It also means we will have to have approved third party assessors (3PAOs) in the very near term as they play an integral part in certifying CSPs. It was originally expected that we would have approved 3PAOs in April, but that date was later pushed to early May.
In other cloud news:
- Postal Service Move to Cloud is All About the Data (Government Computer News, May 2)
- Data.gov launches developer community (Government Computer News, May 1)
- Federal government almost ready to launch digital strategy (Federal Computer Week, May 3)
Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.
