Grazed from NextGov. Author: Editorial Staff.

Nineteen of 20 agency plans for future cloud computing projects are missing important elements, a watchdog said Wednesday.

For example, seven of the 20 blueprints submitted to the Office of Management and Budget do not include any cost estimates, according to the Government Accountability Office report. None of the 14 plans that involve migrating existing services to the cloud includes the cost of retiring or repurposing legacy systems, the watchdog said.

Without that information it’s not clear if the agencies will be able to wring all possible savings from the cloud projects, GAO said.

Technology officials have estimated the government can save $5 billion annually by moving 20 percent of its information technology infrastructure from agency-owned data centers to more nimble cloud computing…

Grazed from FederalWeek. Author: Editorial Staff.

The State Department’s cloud computing environment doesn’t match the standards that the National Institute of Standards and Technology has established for clouds, according to a report from the department’s inspector general.

In the “Key Judgments” section of the report, issued in June, Deputy IG Harold Geisel wrote that State’s Systems and Integration Office (SIO) “has a knowledgeable, hardworking, and engaged management team that, for the most part, effectively dispatches its duties, which involve a wide range of new and old technologies, centralized and decentralized models of network management, budgetary items it can and cannot control, as well as colocated and dispersed physical locations.”…

Grazed from FedLine. Author: Nicole Johnson.

The Defense Information Systems Agency will play a major role in deciding how the Defense Department adopts cloud computing services and products.

DISA will serve as the department’s enterprise cloud service broker, which means all DoD components must acquire government or industry-provided cloud services using DISA, according to a June 26 memo from DoD chief information officer Teresa Takai that was released Wednesday. The only exception is to obtain a waiver from a review authority designated by Takai.

DISA will work on behalf of the department to manage the use, performance and delivery of cloud services and negotiate contracts between cloud service providers and DoD consumers. The memo does not detail how DISA’s relationship with DoD will work in the event that DISA is competing for DoD’s cloud business. Currently, DISA provides cloud email services for the Army…

Enterprise Clouds and Swiss Cheese

Grazed from Trefis. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) recently debuted its virtual cloud-routing and WAN optimization platform under the Cisco Cloud Connected Solution brand. The new product solution will help businesses take advantage of cloud computing to deploy cloud-related services and transition their virtual private networks into the cloud. It would also address the traditional cloud computing concerns of speed and bandwidth problems to “offer an optimal user experience at the lowest cost”. [1] With businesses increasingly looking to move their applications to the cloud, Cisco’s move will help it address the changing trends and drive its earnings higher in the future.

Cisco’s enterprise muscle

Enterprise routing is a Cisco stronghold with the company boasting of as many as 500,000 customers who have deployed its routing solutions worldwide. It has more than 77% market share of the global enterprise router market, as per our estimates…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Greg Ferro.

People are the No. 1 reason why private clouds fail. The traditional IT management team is composed of tactically oriented, powerless leaders who aren’t familiar with their core business and aren’t equipped to handle dynamic IT business challenges presented by private clouds. They’re more comfortable with sticking with what they know, avoiding change and ignoring the business risk of preventing change. They will be the downfall of your private cloud deployment.

Today’s IT management is unprepared for change and unable to map a dynamic IT environment like a private cloud into a static and unyielding business process such as that espoused by ITIL or The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF). Everyone can see that business drivers are changing. Engineers have already embraced the new technologies of the private cloud. Management must deliver new accounting methods, better risk management and long-term funding to develop new private cloud infrastructures. At the same time, IT managers are refusing to change the existing business processes, accept risk and move their organizations forward…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

It’s a tough economy out there. That’s why some figures from the new Uptime Institute’s 2012 Data Center Industry Survey might surprise those who would expect spending on data center infrastructure to be cut to the bone. That’s not true for the majority of the 1,100 owners and operators that responded to the second annual survey. Here are my top five fun facts from the new survey.

1. Public cloud is big, private cloud is bigger. This year, 25 percent of respondents said they’re adopting public cloud, up from 16 percent last year. And 49 percent are deploying private clouds, up from 35 percent last year…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Michael Cooney.

It’s no secret that agencies core to the U.S. government has as a central plan – known as Cloud First — to move most operations toward a cloud computing service. In the process of course is a never-ending evaluation by other agencies to talk about how those cloud implementations are doing.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued the Cloud First policy in December 2010 which requires federal agencies to implement cloud services whenever a secure, reliable and cost-effective cloud option exists; and to have migrated three technology services to the cloud by June.

This week the Government Accountability Office issued a report on the overall progress of that plan and in the process found seven common challenges that the GAO said may end up impeding their ability to realize the expected benefits of cloud-based implementations…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Elizabeth White.

ActiveState has announced the general availability of Stackato 2.0, the application platform for creating a private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). The private PaaS solution now supports .NET applications, offers web-based visual cluster management and delivers performance improvements that foster enterprise development agility. In conjunction with the release, ActiveState also announced a Stackato enterprise customer relationship with Aeroflex.

According to Bart Copeland, CEO at ActiveState, "Stackato 2.0 redefines private PaaS for the enterprise, enabling more agile development, greater DevOps transparency, more efficient cloud management and faster time to market."…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

GenoSpace, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based informatics company, has launched a cloud computing platform to provide access to a variety of genomic and phenotypic data and designed to advance biomedical research and personalized medicine.

Formed in 2011, GenoSpace leverages years of systems development experience and deep domain knowledge of founders John Quackenbush and Mick Correll, who, together at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, created software systems linking clinical and research data. Recognizing that the rapidly falling cost of genome sequencing would make existing systems obsolete, they developed a cloud-based data storage and "software-as-a-service" platform based on a robust, scalable, and secure data model. A key element of the GenoSpace system is its collection of intuitive, informative, data-access portals that can address the needs of a broad range of users…