Richard Davies wrote: The UK has a good crop of technology pioneers in cloud computing - for example ElasticHosts, FlexiScale, Flexiant, OnApp - and also some strong government initiatives such as G-Cloud.
We will have to see whether this kind of technical leadership converts into swift mass-market adoption or not.
Jan. 8, 2012 11:38 AM EST
The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a government-wide program established in December 2011 to speed the adoption of cloud computing. FedRAMP includes a set of requirements for federal cloud computing and universal procedures for approving services and pro...
As we head into Thanksgiving Weekend, we bring a brief round-up of some of the many follow-up comments we have been receiving since November's 9th Cloud Expo in Santa Clara, CA. Thanks for your thanks, and see you on the other side...when the countdown steadily begins to New York's meg...
With Cloud Expo Silicon Valley (9th Cloud Expo) now in its final day, Thursday November 10 at the Santa Clara Convention Center, CA, here's who is round off the four-day event in our keynote hall this morning...none other than the CIO of the National Reconnaissance Office, Jill T. Sing...
The doors open today on 9th Cloud Expo - Cloud Expo Silicon Valley - the biggest event in the world-beating Cloud Expo series to date, with more members of the cloud computing ecosystem gathered than anyone has ever seen before in one place, to play catch-up with Internet technology's ...
What better time, with just a few days now to go before Cloud Expo Silicon Valley (9th Cloud Expo), to bring you a series in which we introduce you in greater detail to our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical program at the conference? We have technical and strategy sessions f...
Security remains the number one obstacle to adoption of cloud computing for businesses and federal agencies. Regardless of the deployment model selected--private, public, community, or hybrid—conquering security concerns is required for cloud computing to achieve its full potential as...
What does the CIO of the National Reconnaissance Office have in common with the CEOs of Abiquo, Apprenda, Tier3, OutSystems and OpSource, the Co-Founder & CTO of Dell Boomi, the CTOs of Rackspace, rPath, Compuware, BMC, NextIO, SoftLayer, SOASoftware, Gale Technologies, CiRBA and UShar...
An alphabetical selection of some of the many themes & topics to be discussed at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley (9th Cloud Expo) - being held November 7-10, 2011, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, CA. The markets may still be melting, but Cloud Expo is definitely coming of age! 
I wonder how much Vivek Kundra's departure will slow down the government's innovation, which is already too slow! I may be able to understand Vivek's frustration with the Federal Government. He is responsible for Data.gov. His plans to consolidate over 800 federal data centers, the ...
In October 2009, Enterprise Cloud Computing was considered bleeding edge technology by many but there was something that seemed different about its value potential and adoption rate. For CIOs, it seemed a chance to provision affordable infrastructure quickly, alleviating delays to miss...
In the Fall of 2009, while she was Deputy CIO of the Central Intelligence Agency, Jill Tummler Singer 
In December 2010, the U.S. Federal government awarded cloud computing contracts that totaled over $2B in value. It also announced a mandatory "cloud first" policy, requiring every agency to deploy at least three of its services to the cloud. This transition represents a monumental chan...
The City & County of San Francisco has decided to let Microsoft host the email accounts for 23,000 employees in an Exchange Cloud Computing architecture, at a cost of about $1 per week per person. It will consolidate several existing email systems in the process.
The $1.2 million an...
I'm returning to the US this week after spending more than a year in Asia. I'm pessimistic about many things, as I recently explained in a separate article.
But let's talk about the rays of light in today's grim global greyness. Let's talk about Cloud Expo.
I don't know much, but...
We have discussed this before and I'm sure we will talk about it again - government cutbacks and consolidation of cloud hosting. New York has opened an enormous new data center in Brooklyn where the city will centralize all its infrastructure for its agencies of the decade.
It has i...
The decision framework for cloud migration that US Federal CIO Vivek Kundra recently published as part of his Federal cloud computing strategy, offers advice applicable to all organizations.
In my last blog, a cloud of two speeds, I mentioned Vivek Kundra's very readable cloud strate...
Delegates, speakers, sponsors and exhibitors will be traveling from all over the world to New York this coming June 6-9 to attend 8th International Cloud Expo in New York City, co-located at the Jacob Javits Convention Center with 11th Virtualization Conference & Expo.
Here is an ea...
Since the CIO.gov site is down for maintenance I wanted to help spread the word on this new document, the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy.
I hate to say this, but I have not read it myself yet! But I have read everything else Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has had a hand in publishing an...
In reading Vivek Kundra’s “25 Point Implementation Plan To Reform Federal Information”, I was struck by the anecdote regarding how the lack of scalability was the cause for outages and, ultimately, delays in processing transactions on the Car Allowance and Rebate System (CARS) or as it...
"We are the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook. In America, innovation doesn’t just change our lives. It’s how we make a living." With this one sentence, President Barack Obama ushered in once...
The most compelling argument for Governments to adopt Cloud Computing is Open Government.
Migrating the legacy data-centre to the Cloud will happen but will move slowly due to IT complexities and the usual resistance to outsourcing, whereas in contrast the Cloud is ideal for public-fa...
Public-facing web sites belonging to the US Treasury Department like the agency main site treasury.gov and little numbers like MyMoney.gov, TIGTA.gov, SIGTARP.gov and IRSOversightBoard.treasury.gov have moved to Amazon EC2 according to government contractor Smartronix, responsible for ...
Open Government best practices can be utilized to transform national innovation programs.
Canada is scoring a 'D for Innovation', and falling behind other nations in their innovation capacities.
They also have perceived issues around the bite of their Open Government watchdogs, and w...
"One day the cloud really will be big..." concludes an article in this week's international print edition of The Economist, an intriguing article that sets out to quantify the size of the three main layers of the cloud computing ecosystem.
A few months back, in a story mostly about Microsoft’s complicated relationship with the Russian government and its seemingly dualistic role in the ongoing suppression of various free speech and human rights organizations, we also surfaced contemporaneous reports in the Russian languag...
Cloud Computing Journal authors look at the short- and mid-term future of the Cloud. Today we start with KEVIN L. JACKSON Editor, Government Cloud Computing on Ulitzer, and LARRY CARVALHO, the 2011 Instructor of Cloud Expo's ever popular Cloud Computing Bootcamp.
Vivek Kundra, the CIO of the United States, is getting down to business on the “Cloud First” initiative that was announced by the OMB a few weeks back. He’s been showing a snappy slide deck around town in DC the past few days that will probably affect different people in very differen...
Launched by our Cloud Ventures incubator, the Open Government Innovation network is a CoP (Community of Practice) focused on the dynamic of how Cloud computing technologies can enable the policies of Open Government. Best practices innovation community This actually aligns wholly with ...
If there were ever two concepts that are representative of where we are today in technology, they would have to be Government 2.0 and Community. Unfortunately, they are also two of the most overused and over-hyped phrases in our technology vocabulary.
Government 2.0 is a general term...
At an event aimed at lawyers and called "Doing Business in the Electronic Age," EMC VP and Deputy General Counsel Krish Gupta has been emphasizing how cloud computing is the future of business. Virtualization and cloud computing are the top two priorities of CIOs, Gupta said.
As widely reported this week, the United States General Services Administration (GSA) has awarded a contract to Unisys to create a secure cloud-based email and collaboration platform. The solution will be based on Google Apps for Government and is expected to save $15M over the next fi...
Is Web 3.0 maybe going to be less the utopia we've been envisaging and more like the real, physical world, with all the real-world limitations that follow along with it...?|
The latest WikiLeaks ("Cablegate") affair, coming as it does at the very end of the first decade of the 21st ...
One sure sign that a new technology market is approaching critical mass is when people start fighting over it. I’m not talking about abstract arguments and dialectical debates about meanings and means. I’m talkin’ fisticuffs, mano a mano, the sweet science! And with cloud computing,...
The Whitehouse Office of Management and Budget has announced that, from now on, cloud computing would be the “default approach to IT” for US government agencies. The move comes as an element of a sweeping set of government IT reforms begun last summer intended to “close the IT gap” be...
In the run-up to the next Cloud Expo, 7th Cloud Expo (November 1-4, 2010) at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley, it's time to give my earlier list a complete overhaul. Here, accordingly, is an expanded list of the most active players in the Cloud Ecosystem.
In an effort to deliver technology services as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible, the State of Minnesota's Office of Enterprise Technology (OET) signed a groundbreaking enterprise-wide service agreement with Microsoft last week. The agreement calls for the State's Enterprise...
Another apparently cool thing: The agreement can extend down to the county and local levels, too. "We currently consume cloud-based services for key financial business applications," said Marilyn McCarter, CIO of Scott County, Minnesota. "This agreement creates a tremendous potential o...
In the mid '90s, I started up a practice at a large systems integrator helping customers plan, design and implement on-premise e-mail systems. Very often the differentiator was the collaborative functions that an organization could also leverage during the e-mail system implementation....
With all the concerns about security risks relating to the cloud that are frequently brought up, there is no better way for the technology to stand up to scrutiny and quell any nagging doubts than to win over Federal bodies which are inherently apprehensive of turning over data to a th...
