Links List 9.11.09

September 11th, 2009 by Valerie Barber

The Gov 2.0 Summit was held this week in Washington with top federal IT officers on hand to discuss government IT initiatives. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra told attendees that he wants to implement cloud computing “so we’re not spending millions when we could be spending thousands.”  Casey Coleman, CIO of GSA said about 45% of government applications could exist in a public cloud now. Coleman believes the cloud can make federal government operations faster, less expensive and more sustainable, saying:

“The value proposition around cloud computing does all that. That’s why the GSA wants to make industry solutions for cloud computing available to the government.”

Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra, also speaking at Gov 2.0 said the OMB is just a few weeks away from issuing an Open Government Directive outlining steps agencies can take toward transparency, collaboration and participatory government of their organizations and processes. The directive includes a schedule for the public release of data in machine-readable formats (I think that means over the internet), as well as additional “government 2.0″ web sites like data.gov and the IT dashboard.

Could cloud computing, with its significant cost savings that bypass going through a vendor, signal the end of open source? Andrea DiMaio, a member of the Gartner Blog Network says that cloud computing is indeed pulling all the attention away from open source. She cites many of the shared benefits of open source and cloud computing such as:

• eliminating the need for costly and time-intensive hardware acquisitions
• drastically cutting the number of resources needed to maintain systems
• allowing faster provisioning that is easily expanded
• providing a fast way to get rid of licensing costs
• and cloud computing is more politically correct and viewed as innovative

It appears that President Obama is close to appointing Frank Kramer as the White House Cybersecurity Chief. Kramer, assistant defense secretary for Bill Clinton, is reported to be in line to take the position within the next two weeks. FBI official Chris Painter has filled in since last month’s resignation of Melissa Hathaway. The cyber-czar will be tasked with plugging holes to help prevent identity theft and to secure intellectual property and sensitive military information. A welcome appointment, although not in time to prevent Ben Bernake’s wife from becoming a victim of identity theft when her bank account information was stolen by the receptionist in her doctor’s office.

There’s continuing analysis of Gmail’s outage last week with added speculation on whether the cloud is reliable. Do the math – a 99.9% uptime guarantee allows for 9 hours per year of down-time. So how will cloud users be “compensated” for down-time?

There are two sides to every coin, even when it comes to your employment status. So for you glass half-full types, here are some suggestions on how to make yourself layoff-proof. If the glass is half-empty, we suggest how to get fired.

Finally, submit your nominations for the 2009 SysAdmin of the Year, now through Oct. 23. Winners will be announced Nov. 4 at the Large Installation System Administration (LISA) 2009 Conference in Baltimore. Prizes range from a laptop computer to Guitar Hero 5 games. The first 500 submissions will receive a SysAdmin of the Year Rock Star t-shirt.

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2 comments September 11th, 2009