Kevin Jackson, NJVC

Federal agencies that use platform-as-a-service in their cloud computing strategy can cut development costs by 50 percent, according to a recently released white paper by NJVC and Virtual Global.

In “Platform as a Service (PaaS): What Is It? Why Is It So Important?,” authors Kevin Jackson and Cary Landis outline why they believe PaaS is the new way to integrate software into the cloud.

James W. Sheaffer of CSC

Computer Sciences Corporation recently released its infrastructure-as-a-service CloudCompute for Government system, which the company says is designed exclusively for U.S. federal agencies and government personnel.

The company said the multi-tenant community cloud was built under National Institute of Standards and Technology guidelines.

“This cloud offering addresses the federal agencies’ need to comply with security mandates and positions CSC for success in an emerging high-growth market segment,” said James W. Sheaffer, president of CSC’s north american public sector.

According to Dan Lee, product manager of CCFG, the system is quicker and more flexible than traditional private cloud services, and “specifically targeted for government agencies that require FISMA moderate and FISMA low system classification levels.”

According to the company, CCFG is protected by CSC’s holistic defense-in-depth security framework, providing physical and logical security. As part of the framework, CCFG centers are located and geographically dispersed around the U.S., which provides redundancy and recovery capabilities.

Lee said this is the first time CSC has used geographically distanced data centers to support cloud computing services.

Lee indicated that CSC will be targeting all agencies that fall under the FISMA classification levels and hopes to start on-boarding customers directly after CCFG’s release on Jan. 16.

Photo: noaa.gov

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has moved its email system to cloud-based Google Apps for Government, Google announced Wednesday.

Kennith Jackson, deployment manager at Google Apps, wrote in a blog post that it took six months to move NOAA’s 25,000 employees, contractors and associates to the new email platform.

NOAA CIO Joseph Klimavicz said in a YouTube video that the speed and ease of moving to Google Apps was an important factor in the agency’s decision.

Jackson wrote that the move enables NOAA staff to create a more effective work environment through using instant messaging, video chat, and real-time, multi-user document collaboration.

Many employees work out of the office and Google Apps will now enable the agency’s scientists and staff to get their email and other information wherever their work may take them.

GSA image

HP Enterprise Services and Microsoft Corp. have announced a global, four-year initiative to deliver Microsoft’s communications and collaboration products via the public and private cloud.

Through the public cloud, Microsoft will deliver its collaboration and productivity tool Microsoft Office 365. A Microsoft release said the companies’ cloud solutions will shift information technology from a capital to an operating expense.

“Large organizations, particularly those in regulated industries like financial services and public sector, have demanding functionality and service level requirements,” said Brandt Faatz, vice president of workplace services at HP Enterprise Services.

The companies said their cloud solutions will be initially available this month in the U.S., Australia, Canada and the U.K. HP and Microsoft have worked together for 25 years on technical innovation, according to the release.

The cloud has been marketed and implemented as a way to improve communication, speed up business operations, cut costs and reduce energy consumption.

A global survey, composed of 3,645 IT decision makers in eight different countries, was conducted independently by TNS and funded by CSC. The results provided some key statistics in the areas of cloud computing.

Today, 45 percent of U.S. government agencies have moved at least one work flow to the cloud, and it doesn’t look like that number is going to shrink anytime soon, according to the survey. In addition, the number of small businesses turning to the cloud is also growing rapidly.

The survey recorded 33 percent of respondents as reporting the primary reason they moved to the cloud was to improve accessibility through multiple devices, 21 percent as a way to increase the speed of their businesses and 17 percent of respondents reported cutting costs was the most influential reason.

Ninety-three percent of all companies surveyed said they noticed at least one area of improvement in their IT department after moving to the cloud and 47 percent of companies reported lowering operating cost after switching over.

In addition, 64 percent of companies reported they reduced waste and lowered energy consumption when using the cloud.

An online poll by Unisys Corporation furthered the survey findings. In polling 300 respondents throughout September and October of 2011, the company found that 50 percent of respondents ranked cloud computing as their top IT investment priority for 2012.

In addition, 21 percent of respondents ranked cybersecurity as a top priority, and an additional 21 percent ranked mobile/social computing as their top priority.

“Over the past two years cloud computing has moved into the mainstream of IT investment decisions,” said Colin Lacey, vice president, Data Center Services and Solutions, Unisys.

“From the US Federal Government’s ‘cloud first’ policy to enterprise business units’ demands for greater IT responsiveness, business decision makers are embracing both private and public cloud computing models,” added Lacey.

The company released information about its Cisco CloudVerse framework, with which Chief Technology Officer Padmasree Warrior (@Padmasree) made herself available on Twitter for cloud trend questioning.

The New New Internet (@newnewinternet) asked Warrior how this release related to government contracting. She indicated that the government is a key vertical using community clouds, which is a big focus of the release. 

CloudVerse combines many technologies and offerings that were previously provided as individual components, according to Warrior’s blog post on the announcement.

“What we are doing now is bringing these sets of products together,” she wrote.

The framework combines unified data centers, cloud intelligent networks and cloud applications and services, which the company says makes for better security and economics.

The Wall Street Journal points out in its report that data center traffic redistribution from one data center to another usually only happens with one data center in the mix. 

Padmasree defined the “many types of clouds: private clouds, public clouds, hybrid clouds, and even interconnected communities of clouds serving different verticals, like government, healthcare or finance.”

The company indicated that the network framework is an enabler of the cloud community. Cloud is “fundamentally rooted in networking,” according to a comment by Ken Stephens, senior vice president of cloud services for ACS, a Xerox Company.

Through the agreement, a SAP subsidiary would acquire all outstanding common stock shares of SuccessFactors. SuccessFactors’ board approved the transaction, which is expected to close in the first quarter of 2012. 

As a result of the agreement, SuccessFactors’ technology and team will become a part of SAP. The company indicated that combining the companies’ solutions will create, “end-to-end offering of cloud and on-premise solutions for managing all relevant business processes.”

“The cloud is a core of SAP’s future growth, and the combination of SuccessFactors’ leadership team and technology with SAP will create a cloud powerhouse. The acquisition will help us address the top priority for CEOs globally – managing people and talent,” said Bill McDermott, Co-CEO, SAP. 

SuccessFactors, headquartered in San Mateo, Calif. with more than 1,450 employees, provides cloud-based human capital management solutions and is believed to operate the largest scale of cloud users, according to the release.

The company’s CEO, Lars DalGaard, will lead the cloud business of SAP in addition to remaining SuccessFactors’ CEO, which will remain independent and named, “SuccessFactors, an SAP company.”

Kerry Bailey of Terremark

Terremark, a Verizon Company, today announced the completion of the expansion of its data center campus, the Network Access Point West, located in Santa Clara, Calif.

 The firm says the expansion of their center in the technology hub of Silicon Valley, Calif. is part of a global strategy to deliver ultra-secure IT infrastructure and cloud computing solutions from strategically located data center facilities around the world.

 “As a major interconnection point for the world and of the technology industry, the Silicon Valley area has long been a location of strategic importance for Terremark”, said Kerry Bailey, president of Terremark. “Through the expansion of the NAP West, we continue to invest in the strategic global hubs that support the requirements of our expanding global customer base.”

HP says DCNC has high-performance service routing, switching and optical transport capabilities and meets standards for data center trends such as server virtualization, scale-out applications, network convergence and cloud computing.

The solution is a “way to securely share extremely high volumes of data between data center sites when and where it’s needed in an instant,” said Arthur Filip, vice president and general manager, technology consulting, HP. 

These two companies are not strangers to working together. In fact, the two previously agreed to equip enterprises with tools to deliver converged IT and telecom systems with more flexibility, according to the a news release. Atop the announcement of their combined data center solution, HP has also integrated its HP CloudSystem with Alcatel-Lucent. 

The HP and Alcatel-Lucent global alliance has also resulted in the launch of two data center projects in Germany and Switzerland and includes plans to continue to do so, according to the release. 

With most being cloud ready, the company found that the transition to cloud services is “driving global cloud traffic at a growth rate that is twice as great as global data center traffic.”

Cisco predicted that cloud traffic is to grow 12-fold, increasing from 130 exabytes to 1.6 zettabytes annually by 2015. One zettabyte is about the same as streaming 22 trillion hours of music, according to Cisco. 

In its first Global Cloud Index, Cisco looks at cloud and data center traffic trends and application adoption from 2010 to 2015. The report estimates, “global data center and cloud-based Internet Protocol traffic growth and trends.” 

“Cloud and data center traffic is exploding,” said Suraj Shetty, vice president of product and solutions marketing, Cisco. “The result: greater data center virtualization and relevance of the network for cloud applications and the need to make sense of a dynamically evolving situation.”

The company found cloud to be the fastest growing part of data center traffic, making up an estimated 11 percent of data center traffic. While cloud is the fasted growing component, the bulk of the traffic is from data centers completing backups and replication processes that are not visible to end users. 

The company estimated that 76 percent of data center traffic will remain within the data center by 2015 in the form of workload migration across virtual machines and background tasks.

Additionally, the company found, in terms of video-based services, that the average amount of data center traffic per hour during peak periods is expected to rise up to 2.5 times. The estimated increase of traffic calls for plans to ensure data centers, cloud and networks can manage the needed capacity, said the report. 

Cisco shapes its index with modeling and analysis of various primary and secondary sources. The company said it examined more than 30 terabytes of data generated each month over the past year from a variety of global data centers. Charts demonstrating the finds can be found, here.