Fed or Federated Cloud Computing?

I was just reading about how the Fed (with the vision led by Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra) is creating an important new mechanism for granting government-wide approval for agency cloud computing applications that can then be adopted by other agencies. You can read the whole article here, and see details of the government’s plans here, and a presentation from Vivek Kundra here.

What I couldn’t help but think is that the Government (the Fed), will most likely be deploying a federated cloud architecture. Yeap, the Fed will deploy Federated Cloud. What this means is that it will most likely be a hybrid of on-premise virtualized infrastructure coupled with off-premise virtualized infrastructure…..or private and public cloud.

Is the Fed a “real” opportunity?

Or is it just more hype? Well, that’s what got me to thinking. I’ve been talking to many analysts lately on this very topic. “Who’s going to jump into this Cloud game the most, first?” I asked IDC and Gartner this question. Well, to my surprise they said “Government”.

Courtesy of IDC, the following chart depicts the ideal Cloud targets. From what I understand, there are some detailed reports coming out soon about specific Cloud IT spend by vertical. So stay tuned. But for now, as a provider of Cloud service automation software, I’m following this industry vertical roadmap.

Target Industries For Cloud IT

When I read the following, I couldn’t help but chuckle a little.

“The intent of the board is not take away authority from agencies, but to enable them,” Mell, [a senior computer scientist with NIST] said. It would do that by identifying and reviewing cloud computing processes and applications submitted by sponsoring agencies. Once they’ve been authorized, they can be used as building blocks for other agencies, letting them focus on incremental applications, Mell said. It would still be up to agencies to choose whether to use the approved applications.

Yeah right. When you can save two-thirds of your spend on things like email by pushing that IT service into the cloud, this organization was put together to bypass the typical delays associated with governmental agencies. “Step aside, we need to speed up the pace here dammit!”.


Jim Kaskade

Jim Kaskade is a serial entrepreneur & enterprise software executive of over 36 years. He is the CEO of Conversica, a leader in Augmented Workforce solutions that help clients attract, acquire, and grow end-customers. He most recently successfully exited a PE-backed SaaS company, Janrain, in the digital identity security space. Prior to identity, he led a digital application business of over 7,000 people ($1B). Prior to that he led a big data & analytics business of over 1,000 ($250M). He was the CEO of a Big Data Cloud company ($50M); was an EIR at PARC (the Bell Labs of Silicon Valley) which resulted in a spinout of an AML AI company; led two separate private cloud software startups; founded of one of the most advanced digital video SaaS companies delivering online and wireless solutions to over 10,000 enterprises; and was involved with three semiconductor startups (two of which he founded, one of which he sold). He started his career engineering massively parallel processing datacenter applications. Jim has an Electrical and Computer Science Engineering degree from University of California, Santa Barbara, with an emphasis in semiconductor design and computer science; and an MBA from the University of San Diego with an emphasis in entrepreneurship and finance.

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