Last week the US Army released  a procurement solicitation for the Army Private Cloud.  This $249M solicitation calls for a 1-year base period with four, 1-year options. Department of the Army, Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology (ASA [ALT]), Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems (PEO EIS), has a requirement for the Army Private Cloud.

According to the solicitation, "The Department of the Army, Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology (ASA [ALT]), Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems (PEO EIS), has a requirement for the Army Private Cloud." Originally publicized as the Army Enterprise Application Hosting Service (AEAHS), the service cited a need for quick and flexible deployment of applications supporting various levels of mission criticality.

"Traditionally the Army has used a relatively decentralized approach to provision of information systems and services.  This approach has enabled significant innovation and enhanced warfighting capability.  The Army is now ready to leverage a more centralized approach as a component of the LandWarNet strategy.  This approach will enable the Warfighter to access information globally while reducing costs and energy usage.  Cloud Computing is part of this approach and is expected to reduce cost while improving access and security.  The Army cannot afford to continue doing business as usual and will embrace lessons learned from the private sector to achieve cost savings."

In this procurement, the Army will procure two "suites".

Suite 1 encompasses:

i)    Continental United States (CONUS) – Fixed-facility Contractor owned and operated or Government owned facility, operated by the Contractor, including Contractor provisioning and ownership of equipment.
ii)    Outside the Continental United States (OCONUS) – Fixed Government owned facility, operated by the Contractor and including Contractor provisioning and ownership of equipment.  Locations may be either austere or non-austere.

Suite 2 , the Mobile Datacenter, consists of:

i)    Continental United States (CONUS) Containerized Data Center, Contractor owned and including Contractor provisioning and ownership of equipment.  Locations may be either austere or non-austere.
ii)    Outside the Continental United States (OCONUS) Mobile, Containerized Data Center Cloud Computing Services including Contractor provisioning and ownership of the Container and the equipment and including deployment locations in austere or non-austere environments.

Solicitation details are available at the FedBizOpps.gov.

For more on the US Army's cloud computing activity, see:
Army G6 Cloud Roadshow Brief Army Knowledge Leaders Study Cloud Computing The Army's iPhone Story One AWESOME Week of Cloud Computing
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In response to request, the inaugural "Cloud Musings Direct" newsletter was launched this week.  This bi-weekly electronic newsletter will highlight important government cloud computing industry trends and events.  If you didn't see the newsletter in you email inbox on Monday (and it's not caught up in your spam folder), please register to get future issues.

In this week's Cloud Musing's Direct:

NGA Exploring "Community Cloud" with NCOIC
By Kevin Jackson

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is looking to leverage industry expertise through collaboration with the Network Centic Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC). NGA provides timely, relevant and accurate geospatial intelligence in support of national security objectives. NCOIC's  mission is to facilitate global realization of the benefit inherent in Network Centric Operations.  To that end, they seek to enable continuously increasing levels of interoperability across the spectrum of joint, interagency, intergovernmental, and multinational industrial and commercial operations.  Both organizations are looking to this collaborative effort to help enhance worldwide sharing of geospatial intelligence. More

Government Pushes, Questions Cloud
By Hovhannes Avoyan

President Obama is pushing cloud computing and the U.S. government has created an app store (Apps.gov). Yet federal officials still have plenty of questions and concerns surrounding security on the cloud. A recent PCWorld magazine article cited a GAO report that was released this week  that listed several security concerns — among them, vendors using ineffective security practices, agencies not able to examine the security controls of cloud suppliers , criminals targeting data-rich clouds, and agencies losing access to their data if the relationship with a vendor ends. More

NASA Collaborates with Japan Over Joint Open Source Cloud Computing
By Lavenya Dilip

NASA and Japan's National Institute of Informatics (NII) will be collaborating on interoperability between NASA's Nebula Cloud Computing Platform and Japan's NII Cloud infrastructure. Nebula, NASA’s huge open source project for the purpose of on-demand cloud computing integrates cloud computing and data center containers for NASA’s new data powerhouse and provides access to high performance computing and storage for the space agency’s researchers. Japan's NII Cloud provides cloud platform services to Japan's academic and research community. NASA Nebula and NII's Cloud are both built entirely using open source technologies and open-data application programming interfaces. More

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When my good friend Jeremy Geelan invited me to speak at CloudExpo Europe in Prague, Czech Republic my imagination went into overdrive.  Being a child of the 60's and a retired US military officer, my memories of a dark time flooded my mind.  I imagined a throwback world, full of retired spies in old trench coats, trying to catch up to the 21st century. I am now, quite frankly, embarrassed by those prejudiced and dated thoughts. Prague is not only a wonderful and beautiful city, but served as an outstanding host  for CloudExpo Europe 2010. Jeremy, please invite me again!!



On a more capitalist note, Prague also proved to be an excellent place for business. Europe seems to be serious about understanding cloud computing and the attendees proved to be a skeptical bunch. In my session, International Collaboration on Cloud Computing, the questions centered on why the United States government was being so aggressive in its adoption of cloud computing. After doing a short demo of Data.gov and Flyontime.com, however, skepticism quickly gave way to excitement about the possibilities.

Two thumbs up for Prague and CloudExpo Europe 2010 !!

International collaboration with Cloud v1
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Last week in Brussels, Belgium, the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium highlighted it's support of collaboration and interoperability through an information exchange session with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and an impressive lab interoperability demonstration .

As published in Defense News, the "lab interoperability framework" demonstration was designed to show how different players could share an operational picture of an area. The NCOIC pointed to the recent Haiti operation or the Gulf of Mexico oil spill as examples where different networks or countries could communicate using these standards. Customers could be NATO, the European Union, civilians, governments or industry. The standards will be published free of charge for public use later this year after the NCOIC gives final approval. The NCOIC says that using its lab interoperability framework can save companies approximately $200,000 per event in labor costs, shorten execution timelines by 66 percent and reduce the risk of event failure.  

In an effort to engage and collaborate with industry, the NGA briefed attendees on the Geospatial Community Cloud Project. While this effort is not an acquisition, it is intended to be an opportunity to discuss the status of geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) sharing across the community and to explore the application of cloud computing to this important requirement.  For next steps, the agency charged NCOIC members to provide a plan of actions and milestones for possible inclusion of NGA systems on the NCOIC lab interoperability test bed. Recommendation are scheduled to be presented at the next NCOIC plenary, September 10, 2010 in Falls Church, Virginia. The entire NGA brief is provided below.

Sharing Geospatial Intelligence and Services
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Thank you to Radiah Givens-Nunez and GovLoop for the honor of being their Member of the Week for June 21-25, 2010.

Created in 2008, GovLoop is an online social network for government community around the world. Founded by Steve Ressler the "Facebook for Government" currently has over 30,000 members. Radiah is a social media consultant who helps organizations create successful social media strategies that extends their brand beyond traditional media platforms.

Other GovLoop members that also received this honor include:

• Joshua Salmons
• Sandy Ressler
• NASA's Beth Beck
• Mark Gorkin a.k.a."The Stress Doc"
• Tariq Piracha
• Luke Fretwell
• Benjamin Strong

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We just finished up five AWESOME days of cloud computing training with USAREUR in Schwetzingen, Germany ! CHECK IT OUT !!


Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

Sure we had fun, but we worked hard and learned a lot.  Check out these final presentations.

USAREUR Cloud Computing Training Class Presentation Heidelberg 1
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USAREUR Cloud Computing Training Class Presentation Heidelberg 2
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USAREUR Cloud Computing Training Class Heidelberg 3
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I would like to publicly thank the entire class for their hard work and valuable contribution to this mutually enriching experience. On to Stuttgart !!

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The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is looking to leverage industry expertise through collaboration with the Network Centic Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC). NGA provides timely, relevant and accurate geospatial intelligence in support of national security objectives. NCOIC's  mission is to facilitate global realization of the benefit inherent in Network Centric Operations.  To that end, they seek to enable continuously increasing levels of interoperability across the spectrum of joint, interagency, intergovernmental, and multinational industrial and commercial operations.  Both organizations are looking to this collaborative effort to help enhance worldwide sharing of geospatial intelligence.

The term “geospatial intelligence” (GEOINT) means the exploitation and analysis of imagery and geospatial information to describe, assess and visually depict physical features and geographically referenced activities on the Earth. Geospatial intelligence consists of imagery, imagery intelligence and geospatial (e.g., mapping, charting and geodesy) information. GEOINT is also a crucial component to the success of international humanitarian efforts, such as tracking floods, disaster support, and peacekeeping. 

Through the Multinational Geospatial Co-Production Program (MGCPP), 28 countries share a central database for geospatial information. As a key member, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is currently exploring a strategy for enhancing the MGCPP into an interoperable resource capable of supporting multinational nation building efforts. Their immediate interest is in developing an open standards based “community cloud” that would support the 26 NATO, 10 partner and 2 non-NATO/non-partner countries of United Nations Security Council established International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. 

Current plans are to kick off this collaborative effort during the NCOIC Plenary Meeting in Brussels, Belgium, June 21-25, 2010. On Thursday June 24th NGA would like to explore how NCOIC processes and patterns could be used to achieve this goal. This 2-hr afternoon plenary session will open with NGA representative providing an overview of their challenge. NCOIC IPT and working group representatives will then provide some initial insight into how their processes and/or products could support the NGA strategy.  The session will close with the development of an action plan for developing NCOIC recommendations for presentation during the September plenary session in Falls Church, VA.

The NCOIC June plenary week will also feature addresses from three senior European organization representatives:

• Dag Wilhelmsen, Technical Director, NATO Communications and Information Systems Services Agency (NCSA)
• IGA Patrick Fermier, National co-Vice Chair, NATO Command, Control & Communications (NC3) Agency Board
• RADM Denis Trioulaire, European Defense Agency 

Registration is required for all attendees and there is no conference fee.  For complete agenda information and registration, please go to  https://www.SignUp4.net/Public/ap.aspx?EID=JUNE48E

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On Thursday, May 26th, the Federal Executive Forum featured three important Federal cloud computing leaders:

• David McClure- Associate Administrator, GSA Office of Citizen Services and Communications
• Col. Kevin Foster- Office of the Secretary of Defense
• Chris Kemp- CTO, NASA Ames

The one hour program discussed:
-  Key Initiatives & Progress Made in Cloud Computing
-  NASA Ames Nebula and DISA RACE Case Studies 
- GSA Cloud Computing Storefront Update 
- Barriers or Contraints to still overcome in getting to a Secure Cloud Environment 
- A Future Vision for the next 1-2 Years in Cloud Computing

A program excerpt is provided below.

Federal Executive Forum Secure Cloud 5 26 10

(View more content from Kevin Jackson.)
Video of the entire program is available on the Federal Executive Forum website. These 1 hour radio and video programs are produced and broadcast monthly in Washington, DC and feature 3-4 Top Government IT Executives discussing mission critical issues. The programs always include some of the top federal government technology leaders.





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I'm declaring Monday, May 24th, as Cloud Computing Day at DoDIIS.  Lieutenant General Richard Zahner, Army Deputy Chief of Staff, G2, seemed to get things going with his video that highlighted the future Army's dependence on "cloud nodes". I also enjoyed the keynote by EMC Corporation Board Chairman, President and CEO Joseph Tucci's "A New Vision of IT: The Private Cloud".  As I listed last week, many of the breakout sessions also focused on cloud. In fact, an additional Wednesday session titled "High Assurance Platform (HAP) - The Cloud In Your Pocket" was added.

The highlight of my day was of course the panel where I had the honor of sharing with Teresa Westfall of the NRO and Bob Lozano from Appistry. We had over 100 energized attendees. Thank you all for your interest.  As promised, the panel presentations are provided below.


Teresa Westfall - DoDIIS Worldwide 2010
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Kevin Jackson - DoDIIS Worldwide 2010
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Bob Lozano - DoDIIS Worldwide 2010
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Last week Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra release his report on the “State of Public Sector Cloud Computing”. The report not only details Federal budget guidance issued to agencies to foster the adoption of cloud computing, but it also describes 30 illustrative case studies at the Federal, state and local government level. As stated in the report:


“The Obama Administration is changing the way business is done in Washington and bringing a new sense of responsibility to how we manage taxpayer dollars. We are working to bring the spirit of American innovation and the power of technology to improve performance and lower the cost of government operations.”

Issuance of this report reinforces last week’s Washington, DC event during which the CIO pushed to engage closely with industry on this important journey towards cloud computing. A critical aspect of this journey is the development of cloud computing standards. Led by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) , these activities will facilitate industry adoption of high priority security, interoperability, and portability requirements. Current cloud computing standards development activities, conducted by the NIST Information Technology Laboratory (ITL), include:

Special Publications: NIST plans to issue an initial SP on cloud computing. The purpose is to provide insight into the benefits and considerations, and the secure and effective uses of cloud computing. More specifically, the document will provide guidance on key considerations of cloud computing: interoperability, portability, and security. To present these issues, the document will use the broadly recognized and adopted NIST Definition of Cloud Computing as a basis, given informal models of the major cloud computing service categories (Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Infrastructure as a Service). The publication will outline typical terms of use for cloud systems, will synopsize future research areas in cloud computing, and will provide informal recommendations.

Standards Acceleration to Jumpstart Adoption of Cloud Computing (SAJACC): The SAJAAC strategy and approach is to accelerate the development of standards and to increase the level of confidence in cloud computing adoption during the interim period before cloud computing standards are formalized. SAJACC will provide information about interim specifications and the extent that they support key cloud computing requirements through a NIST hosted SAJACC portal. More specifically, SAJACC will provide a public Internet-accessible repository of cloud computing usage scenarios (i.e., use cases), documented cloud system interfaces, pointers to cloud system reference implementations, and test results showing the extent to which different interfaces can support individual use cases.


Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP): NIST, in the technical advisory role to the interagency Federal Cloud Computing Advisory Council (CCAC) Security Working Group will define an initial technical approach and process for FedRAMP consistent with NIST security guidance in the context of the Federal Information System Management Act (FISMA). To clarify the role of NIST with respect to FedRAMP, while NIST is supporting the definition of the FedRAMP process from a technical perspective, NIST is not the implementing organization. The governance and operational implementation of FedRAMP will be completed under the auspices of the Federal CIO Council.

I personally urge you to take a look at the case studies provided. Federal agency examples are impressive!

• Department of Defense (United States Army) - Army Experience Center
• Department of Defense (Defense Information Systems Agency) - Rapid Access Computing Environment
• Department of Defense (Defense Information Systems Agency) - Forge.mil
• Department of Defense (United States Air Force) - Personnel Services Delivery Transformation
• Department of Energy (Lawrence Berkeley National Labs) - Cloud Computing Migration
• Department of Health and Human Services - Supporting Electronic Health Records
• Department of the Interior - Agency-wide E-mail
• General Services Administration (Office of Citizen Services) - USA.gov
• General Services Administration - Agency-wide E-mail
• National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Ames Research Center) - World-Wide Telescope
• National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) - Be A Martian
• National Aeronautics and Space Administration - Enterprise Data Center Strategy
• Social Security Administration - Online Answers Knowledgebase
• Federal Labor Relations Authority - Case Management System
• Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board - Recovery.gov Cloud Computing Migration
• Securities and Exchange Commission - Investor Advocacy System

Although these only represent the tip of the iceberg, they are also proof positive that the public sector’s move towards cloud computing is real and enduring



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Next week in Phoenix, AZ, the Defense Intelligence Agency will host the 2010 Department of Defense Intelligence Information Systems (DoDIIS) Worldwide Conference. The theme of this event is "Mission Powered Partnerships...Keeping our Customers One Step Ahead." The conference will feature 400 solution providers, over 2000 attendees, high level plenary speakers, numerous breakout sessions and nightly networking socials.

On Monday, May 24th, cloud computing is a prominent topic with the following sessions scheduled:

A New Vision of IT: The Private Cloud
Mr. Joseph M. Tucci
Chairman, Board of Directors, President and Chief Executive Officer, EMC Corporation

We are at the beginning of what largest and most significant wave of beneficial change in the IT industry's long evolution. This new wave, known as cloud computing, has captured the attention of pragmatic organizations everywhere that are frustrated with the increasing complexity, inflexibility, and cost of their IT environments. The private cloud holds the promise of providing you with a dramatically more efficient and effective model for delivering IT as a service. Mr. Tucci will offer an industry perspective on what the private cloud is and how organizations can make the journey from the world of physical IT to fully virtualized IT and ultimately to cloud-based IT infrastructures.

Cloud Computing: Government Challenges and Industry Perspectives
Bob Lozano, Appistry; Kevin Jackson, NJVC; Teresa Westfall, NRO

Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. In this session, The NRO CIO will outline the value and challenges of cloud computing to the intelligence community. Industry representatives will then present a mission-driven process for developing practical cloud computing solutions. This process represents lessons learned from actual cloud computing projects.

Data Center to Cloud: Architecting the Network for the Cloud Data Center
John Bartlomiejczyk, Juniper Networks, Inc.

As talk of cloud computing swirls through the IT atmosphere, IT executives are sorting fact from fiction while trying to figure out what the new cloud computing model means for their organization. This presentation will focus on the processes of simplify, share, and secure to achieve the highly scalable, uncompromising performance, security, and manageability of the Cloud Data Center.

Information Integration (I2) Pilot
Douglas McGovern, ODNI

The I2 Pilot is employing scalable cloud computing and shared technical services to demonstrate the viability of a distributed/federated Enterprise Infrastructure supporting both Mission and Business Operations of the Intelligence Community.



See you at DoDIIS !!




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In an important industry contribution, The Open Group has published a white paper on how to build and measure cloud computing return on investment (ROI). Produced by the Cloud Business Artifacts (CBA) project of The Open Group Cloud Computing Work Group, the document:

• Introduces the main factors affecting ROI from Cloud Computing, and compares the business development of Cloud Computing with that of other innovative technologie;
• Describes the main approaches to building ROI by taking advantage of the benefits that Cloud Computing provide; and
• Describes approaches to measuring this ROI, absolutely and in comparison with traditional approaches to IT, by giving an overview of Cloud Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and metrics

In presenting their model, business metrics were used to translate indicators of cloud computing capacity-utilization curves into direct and indirect business benefits. The metrics used include:

Speed of Cost Reduction;


Optimizing Ownership Use;


Rapid Provisioning;

Increase Margin;


Dynamic Usage; and



Risk and Compliance Improvement;

A description of the ROI model used is also provided.



A definite must read!

Available online at http://www.opengroup.org/cloud/whitepapers/ccroi/index.htm

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Sandra Erwin of National Defense magazine just published an excellent article on the Army's foray into developing soldier-friendly smartphone applications.  Giving credit to Army CIO Lt. Gen, Jeffrey Sorenson and Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli, Sandra describes the services first steps towards the use of smartphones and cloud computing.According to the article, the Army is already planning to outfit 200 soldiers in a Fort Bliss, Texas brigade this year with an iPhone like device. “They’ll have the apps for system maintenance, instruction manuals. … Soldiers will give us feedback and comments on performance of the equipment, Wikipedia-like.”

I would also like to thank Sandra for giving me the opportunity to provide my views on this forward leaning move by the Army. A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of teaching a Army Knowledge Leaders class on cloud computing.  Being a Naval Academy grad, you can imagine how difficult it is for me to give the Army credit for anything!!

GO NAVY!! BEAT ARMY !!!!




OK. That feels better :-)




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" [C]loud customers must be able to easily store, access, and process data across multiple clouds; weave together a mesh of different services to meet their needs; and have a way to collaborate with business partners around the globe. Federated clouds – networks of interoperable clouds that work together – will give rise to service grids which can harmonize technologies, business processes and policies to provide support across multiple businesses, industries, and levels of government. Through such a "network of networks" the true potential of cloud computing will be realized. 


This is why National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is charged with leading our efforts on standards for data portability, cloud interoperability, and security."

  - Vivek Kundra, April 8, 2010

Through NIST, the Federal government will now address cloud interoperability, portability and security in a focused and collaborative manner. To kick this off,  a "Cloud Summit" on May 20, 2010 will be used to introduce NIST as the lead organization for the definition of the Federal Government’s requirements for cloud computing, key technical research, and United States standards development. In my view, the Federal government and industry are now fully engaged in an exciting joint effort to build the cloud computing industry.

To drive this, NIST has created centralized certification process to provide common security management services to Federal agencies.

"The process supports the development of common security requirements and performs authorization and continuous monitoring services for government-wide use, enabling Federal agencies to rapidly, securely and cost-effectively procure technologies. Agencies can realize these benefits by leveraging the security authorizations provided through a joint authorization board. The board consists of the agency sponsoring a system’s government-wide authorization and three permanent members: the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and the General Services Administration. The board will provide both initial and ongoing acceptance of risk on behalf of the government as systems are continuously monitored throughout their lifecycle."


The full text of Vivek Kundra's remarks and his slides are available on-line.



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