IfG.CC - The Potsdam eGovernment Competence Center

At a press conference held on a Microsoft campus, the panel of technology executives, and state and local government IT officials discussed the state of cloud computing deployment in the public sector and addressed the challenges to moving agencies and departments into a cloud environment.

Ninety-three percent of organizations already have a healthcare digital transformation strategy or are in the process of creating one, according to BDO’s Healthcare Digital Transformation Survey.

Additionally, 60 percent of healthcare organizations are adding new digital projects, while 42 percent of organizations are accelerating some or all of their existing digital transformation plans.

Take the Bush administration's desire for a federated identity management gateway under the E-Authentication initiative. The White House began developing it in 2003 as part of its e-government strategy.

E-Authentication struggled to gain traction and OMB refocused it in 2007 with the emergence of Homeland Security Presidential Directive-12.

Rural healthcare providers in Colorado now have access to a trifecta of online services that can help them deliver 21st-century medicine. Via the Colorado Telehealth Network (CTN), which offers secure broadband connectivity, rural clinics and hospitals can use cloud-based electronic health records, obtain remote consults from big-city specialists, and connect online with the Colorado Regional Health Organization (CORHIO), a statewide health information exchange.

That includes new security and certification projects aimed at helping agencies transition their data storage to more nimble cloud computing, a governmentwide initiative that officials expect to save $5 billion annually, GSA Associate Administrator Dave McClure said.

For Virginia, the most threatening weather incident this summer did not come as you might expect from a hurricane, but from what’s called a “derecho”: a widespread, long-lived windstorm with rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms.

Without official warning on June 29, a derecho swept across a large swath of the state. At the storm’s height, nearly 2.5 million residents were without power for as long as two weeks — the largest non-hurricane power outage in the state’s history. The situation was made worse by a long heat wave baking the region.

From “cloud first” to “cloud smart,” public-sector agencies have been moving systems off-premises for years. CIOs reflect on what is in the cloud, what can be and what it takes to make the leap.

State and local IT leaders are galloping toward the cloud, whether they know it or not.

Thirty-seven percent say they moved on-premise infrastructure to public cloud this past year, according to the 2022 CompTIA Public Technology Institute (PTI) State of City and County IT National Survey. And 32 percent said that migrating systems and applications to the cloud will be a top priority in the next two years.

Several chief information officers and leading executives in the IT community from across the nation joined together Thursday at the National Association of State Chief Information Officers’ 2014 Midyear Conference in Baltimore to discuss cloud expansion at the state level. While they described a bumpy ride so far in the transition to cloud computing, all remained optimistic about the future of cloud in their home states.

Moving government data that are currently housed in dedicated computer servers to more versatile cloud computing space is a major component of Kundra's 25-point plan to reform federal IT, published in December 2010, but he'd previously been less specific about the total projected savings.

FedRAMP, the government program aimed at vetting cloud computing providers, eventually will become mandatory for federal agencies outsourcing cloud services, Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel said Wednesday at a National Institute of Standards and Technology cloud computing government and business conference.

VanRoekel also said the White House is in its final stages of approving FedRAMP, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (see Fed's Common Sense Vetting of Cloud Providers).

For the past decade, US federal government CIOs and IT managers have been working steadlily on a service-oriented approach to delivery of services across the agency. Lately, this effort has been extended to the cloud realm -- also is being embraced across agencies to better streamline the government's $80-billion annual IT budget.

Such is the case for Douglas County, Neb., which is using a cloud solution to test and run GIS applications. The county, whose boundaries include Omaha, has been a longtime user of solutions from Esri, the Redlands, Calif.-based company that specializes in geographic software and services. In 2010, the county put those GIS applications into the Amazon Web Services platform after the county decided it was time for a hardware upgrade, said Mike Schonlau, the county’s GIS coordinator.

"In the first month of 2012, the U.S. government's CIO departments helped draw the policy paper for how deployment should happen in cloud-based operations of the e-government," the news source said. "These guidelines illuminated on fundamentals that software providers had to meet before provisioning. There were also security measures that cloud corporations creating orchestration and provisioning networks across public domains had to adopt in order to pass the test."

Representatives from 10 states and localities met with some of the technology industry’s biggest service providers last week to start bringing government purchasing rules in line with an increasingly cloud-based world.

Government officials cite security and user experience as top concerns in delivering apps in a cloud setting and pushing out online citizen services.

Government CIOs in states and local districts increasingly are looking to push applications to the cloud, but security and a reliable user experience remain principal challenges, a new survey reports

Akamai, which provides a leading online content delivery network, tapped the Center for Digital Government to canvas state and local government IT workers to gauge their technology priorities and concerns, finding that poor user experience is a major obstacle for the spread of e-government services.

To call the government’s cloud investment a community at this point is a stretch. But the forces at play as agencies build their cloud systems are at least community-centric, moving toward shared services, multi-tenant approaches, and linking the workforce with cloud-based tools for real-time collaboration.

Many governments find the lure of cloud-based solutions -- the delivery of computing services such as email, data storage and online forms over the Internet -- to be highly compelling. Government leaders are finding they can lower their information-technology costs and expand services while improving performance and security.

As Dreamforce hit its third day, it could be said that San Francisco is now well aware of the conference's attendees.

Sponsored by data management company Salesforce, Dreamforce 2013 saw notable speakers like Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Haitian Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe and on Wednesday, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

Dave McClure, the General Services Administration's associate administrator in the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies, said the online store will give agencies an avenue to offer, for a fee, excess storage, virtualization and other software-as-a-services to others.

"We want to create a robust environment so that the government is maximizing the use of its computing environment, which is not occurring and which has not occurred historically," McClure said after a speech Thursday at the Cloud/Gov 2012 event sponsored by the Software and Information Industry Association in Washington. "We are talking to government entities that we think are natural candidates to be in that provisioning space. The second step we have to do is to address the policy, security and all those other things that from a government-to-government interaction, that we have a process in place that is quick, efficient and used the same across government."

The 47-page "concept of operations," or CONOPS, is intended to offer federal agencies and their contractors step-by-step instructions for proceeding with the mandatory authorizations that are slated to start in June.

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP, is envisioned as a sort of factory line for approving a particular Web-based service once so that any agency can almost immediately adopt it. Certain products will get to be the first in line, according to the document. They include "infrastructure as a service" tools that provide remote storage and networking, email, and other common collaboration applications. Government-approved, independent auditors then will evaluate each product's compliance with about 300 controls, such as backup storage requirements.