Posts By Kevin Jackson

Lessons Learned: VA Cloud Email Termination

According to a Federal Computer Week article by Frank Konkel, The Department of Veterans Affairs terminated its five-year, $36 million cloud computing contract for email and calendaring services with HP Enterprise Services. Citing a material change in the agency’s requirements, VA officials declined to elaborate on the requirement changes that were actually made. Although IRead… Read more »

Guest Blog: Sequestration and the Cloud

(This post was provided by Praveen Asthana, Chief Marketing Office of Gravitant, a cloud service brokerage and management company) Sequestration burst out of obscurity and entered our household vocabulary in 2013. It got our attention because the impact of it is $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts from the Federal budget over the next tenRead… Read more »

CloudCheckr : Amazon Complexity Challenges Many Users

A recently released infographic from CloudCheckr (http://cloudcheckr.com/) sheds quite a bit of light on the importance of expert advice when an enterprise decides to deploy to the cloud. When AWS made Trusted Advisor free for the month of March, they took that opportunity to conduct an internal survey of their customers’ usage. CloudCheckr compared theRead… Read more »

Top 10 Cloud Impacts in 2013

1. Cloud technologies will converge. The cloud will continue to forge a massive convergence of technologies—similar to the evolution of the cell phone to the smart phone. “The lines between platform as a service (PaaS) and cloud services brokerages will blur into a conceptual operating system for the ‘Web as a platform’—providing tools to allowRead… Read more »

GovCloud Is Now For Real !!

On Friday July 1, Infrastructure-as-a-Services for the US federal government became a reality with Authority to Operate (ATO) approval for the following vendors: Web Hosting CGI Federal Computer Literacy World Eyak Technology Computer Technologies Consultant Savvis Federal Systems Virtual Machine Autonomic Resources Carahsoft Technology Corp CGI Federal Computer Literacy World AT&T Eyak Technology General DynamicsRead… Read more »

US State Department Considers Cloud Computing

(First posted on “Cloud Musings on Forbes“) Today I spent six hours in downtown DC at the first quarterly technology educational seminar and IT Expo to be held by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Information Resource Management. Keeping with the bureau’s mission “to empower diplomacy, consular services, and development, by providing access toRead… Read more »

Federal Cloud Computing Strategy Officially Launched

Federal CIO Vivek Kundra officially launched the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy today. While this is clearly not new news, the document does state the government’s position in a very succint manner. By using the cloud computing model for IT services, we will be able to reduce our data center infrastructure expenditure by approximately 30% (whichRead… Read more »

Global GovCloud with Cisco and VCE

Last week I had the awesome experience of participating in a global telepresence conference on government cloud computing. Joining me as presenters were Blake Salle, Senior Vice President of VCE, who shared a roadmap which focused on goals and objectives to better serve goverment organizations and their constituents, and Joshua McCloud, Public Sector Solutions ArchitectRead… Read more »

USBE&IT Winter Issue Focuses on Cyber Security

Thank You USBE&IT Publisher Mr Tyrone Taborn for such an inspiring issue and my sincere appreciation to Mr. Frank McCoy for my inclusion in his list of Cyber visionaries! The Homeland Security, Government and Defense Edition of US Black Engineer Information Technology inspires as much as it informs. An awesome publication, from the interview withRead… Read more »

On The Frontlines: Cloud Computing in Government

Trezza Media Group released the latest installment of it’s “On The Frontlines” series of government technology reports. The “On The Frontlines” Publications are dedicated to showcasing the positive progress and best practices of the Federal Government Agencies and their strategic partners in meeting the goals of their Mission Programs and supporting the men and womenRead… Read more »