February 17th, 2010 by Larissa Fair
With the snow that hit the DC area last week, agencies that had already implemented telework policies got to experience firsthand the benefits of their efforts. But for those federal workers not lucky enough to have the ability to telework, those employees were anxious to check the operating status of the federal government.
Unfortunately, the millions of necessary (and the merely interested) folks who continuously hit the OPM site to check operating status caused the site to go down. Fortunately, cloud computing came to the rescue.
OPM Director John Berry spoke to Federal News Radio this past week about his experience implementing a cloud computing technology solution to manage the huge influx of traffic.
In one hour they had 1.8 million hits, and the site was down on Sunday night (February 7th). Talk about a scalability and availability issue. Let’s also consider that if OPM was using Twitter, Facebook, or other services hosted elsewhere, they would have still been able to communicate with employees and media on the operating status. Even a simple RSS feed or mobile text alert system would have been helpful in this case.
Instead, a solution that is of particular interest to TimYoungDC was used to combat the down website. Using cloud computing, OPM got together with the CIO at GSA to come up with a solution to share the load with other computer networks, and since then, the website has been up.
The silver lining in this cloud? They forged this solution together while working remotely.
If that wasn’t a case for teleworking and cloud computing, I don’t know what is.
Although Berry consistently cites cloud computing as the reason for keeping his sanity last week, I wonder if the solution was created by implementing a private cloud, public cloud, or hybrid solution? Anyone with more information, please let us know!
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February 17th, 2010
February 12th, 2010 by Valerie Barber
Snowmageddon I & II, Snowpocalypse, Snoverkill…
"Snowmen of the Apocalypse" submitted to the Washington Post by TheTransporter88
These are some of the names for the back-to-back snowstorms in the DC area over the past week and a half. The federal government shut down for four straight days and the kids have been in school two days over the past two weeks. The dialogue about telecommuting for government workers became a hot topic and many workers reported that with power outages they relied on their Blackberries to stay in touch. Heavy traffic crippled the Office of Personnel Management’s website, which registered more than 6.1 million page views in five and a half hours (normally 151,000 per day). Getting around was impossible for a couple of days resulting in the new GSA administrator being sworn in by phone from her home.
While White House cyber coordinator Howard Schmidt works to foster public-private partnerships to prevent cyber attacks, a worldwide survey of industry executives indicates that more than half don’t think their nation’s laws are strong enough to deter cyber attacks and 45% believe their countries are incapable of preventing attacks. The report shows a mixed view of government’s role in private sector cybersecurity and question that information is only shared “one-way”. To top it off, which country is most feared when it comes to cyber attacks? The U.S.
Fears of job security are part of the latest hype around cloud computing but IT professionals have nothing to fear, as network jobs will be just as vital – if not more so – as networks get more complicated because of cloud computing. Analysts from Frost & Sullivan expect new job opportunities for cloud-savvy network administrators among the cloud providers, as well as within enterprise.
“If you want to evolve your career…you’re going to have to start gaining the skill set that’s going to encompass the skills to deal with virtualization, to deal with the cloud and to manage the infrastructure components of things that are in the cloud.”
Vanessa Alvarez, Frost & Sullivan
Many federal agencies are quickly ramping up server virtualization projects, according to CDW Government’s survey of 377 federal IT managers: 73% responded that virtualization is an integral component of IT efficiency and improving costs. While 79% say they are deploying virtualization, only 50% say they are succeeding. Implementing virtualization runs into familiar barriers including limited budgets, security concerns and staff with the appropriate training to manage virtualized environments. Read how three agencies tackled virtualization projects for server consolidation, infrastructure as a service and desktop virtualization.
Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has set up TechStat sessions – meetings between the Office of Management and Budget and agency CIOs, CFOs and other stakeholders to hammer out solutions to IT projects that are over budget, behind schedule or underperforming. The sessions began in January with three or four sessions held each week. Today, TechStat topics are chosen at least partially based on data reported on the White House’s IT Dashboard
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February 12th, 2010
February 11th, 2010 by Valerie Barber
As more organizations move to cloud computing solutions, Jim Metzler at Network World introduces the effect this will have on the WAN. For starters, he defines public and private cloud: Public cloud: using a WAN to access IT resources from a third party (Google, Amazon or Salesforce) where the third party resources perform as service providers. The private cloud is when IT organizations use the same techniques as cloud computing providers inside of their company. In the private cloud, the organization acts as the service provider for the internal customers.
The primary characteristics of private cloud computing are server consolidation and virtualization. Research shows that most organizations have already consolidated some servers and about 40% have consolidated the majority of their servers into centralized data centers. As organizations increase their adoption of both private and public cloud computing, the WAN will be involved in an increasing percentage of instances when users access application and storage, resulting in additional security vulnerabilities. IT organizations should implement WAN optimization controllers (WOC) functionality in their data centers and remote offices.
For organizations using public clouds, both the IT organization and the public cloud providers must implement WOC functionality. Since WOCs are proprietary, the IT organization and the public cloud provider must implement WOCs from the same vendor, meaning WOC functionality should be part of the overall service being delivered to the customer. For both private and public cloud solutions, Application 2.0 WOCs will need to scale for more throughput and more sessions than Application 1.0 WOCs. Because of its well-known issues and performance problems, the Internet is not always the most appropriate WAN service to use to access cloud computing solutions. Research shows that IT organizations are slightly more likely to use the Internet over other WAN services when accessing public cloud services and they are more likely to use a WAN service other than the Internet when accessing private cloud services.
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February 11th, 2010
February 5th, 2010 by Valerie Barber
The new Heinz “Dip & Squeeze” ketchup packet has nothing to do with our usual postings on network management or cloud computing, but if you saw this news, you were probably as happy as I was. They are set to hit restaurants this year.
Now on to the exciting stuff…
Earlier this week, President Obama requested nearly $80 billion for federal IT spending in fiscal year 2011. The number of major IT projects increased to 809 from 781. Obama wants IT efforts related to open government and technology modernization to continue and he acknowledges that consumer technology is ahead of the federal government’s technology. Some White House initiatives include the continued rollout of less intensive and less expensive cloud computing technologies and are seeking ways to reduce the number and cost of federal data centers and reduce the time and effort required to acquire IT. Vivek Kundra said the government will be making a “major shift” to cloud solutions this year and he’s asked the CIOs at Treasury and DHS to lead the effort in consolidating the government’s more than 1,200 data centers.
New specialization for IT jobs is yet another example of the silver lining in cloud computing. The top 10 best IT jobs right now include:
- Security specialist/ethical hacker with the skill sets to better secure their environments
- Virtual systems manager – look for certification programs around virtual skills
- Capacity manager – help optimize resources and accurately assign financial value to technology resources
- Network engineer
- Open source specialist
- Service assurance manager to identify potential problems and optimize performance
- Sourcing specialist to make the choices on when to use SaaS. Cloud computing, managed services, outsourcing, etc.
- Service catalog manager, as enterprises IT operates more like a service provider
Microsoft’s Azure Drive, a service that allows businesses to run existing Windows applications in Microsoft’s cloud environment through standard Windows NTFS APIs. The plans start at $0.12 per hour.
Speaking of pennies, Amazon has lowered the pricing for outbound data transfer by $0.02 across all its services, usage tiers and regions.
A new cloud calculator allows federal agencies quantify their potential cloud savings. It compares the different cloud model options, including private, community and public, to determine the suitability and financial impact of their cloud model choice. With lots of talk of the cloud coming to the federal government, this tool lets agencies get a feel for the cloud economics before they spend their money.
As more enterprises move to the cloud, I found some good basic principles for ensuring security: Improve cloud security in your enterprise.
- Learn from existing, internal security processes that apply to shared services like authentication, provisioning, database services and data centers
- Assess the risk and importance of moving various services to the cloud
- Study the different cloud models and categories
- Start thinking like a cloud provider
- Get familiar with and start using Web security standards now
Oracle released its plan on how it will integrate Sun’s hardware and software into its product lineup and CEO Larry Ellison’s comments led to this sharp reaction from IBM:
“Someone said they should have called his routine ‘Larry the Fable Guy’. I can’t believe some of the stupid—and ignorant—things he said.”
Bernie Spang, IBM’s director of product strategy
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February 5th, 2010
January 29th, 2010 by Valerie Barber
So, your CEO/CIO wants to know why you’re not in the cloud. If you are being careful before jumping on the bandwagon, here are five points you may need to draw upon to dampen the hype surrounding the cloud:
- Not everyone’s in the cloud (yet). Interest is high and there is great momentum, but the numbers show that it’s still in the early adopter stage.
- Learn first, then deploy. Understand the risks and capabilities.
- Learn by putting pilot projects in the cloud, offloading some jobs and letting our IT staff get some experience
- Concerns, including security, reliability and lock-ins
- You’re already there via SasS
A recent survey shows that 80% of network and security operations professionals feel they are not adequately monitoring network segments, application performance or IT service delivery. Despite heavy investment in monitoring tools, the survey indicates challenges in establishing and optimizing network traffic access, translating into operational risks that will only grow over time. Some of the findings:
- 43% indicated a shortage/inability to share span ports or taps for monitoring tools
- 66% lack sufficient monitoring tools and tools budgets
- 75% reported monitoring tools are not optimally deployed
- 47% reported monitoring tools were underutilized
- 25% reported tools were overloaded and dropping packets
“Nearly a quarter of our research group (24%) reported they either lack the staff to keep up with monitoring tasks or the training within existing staff to keep up with administration or interpretation. This situation results from both current and ongoing budgetary pressures as well as a trend (identified by 62%) of staff moving toward more generalist roles, reducing the availability of technical specialists.”
EMA report “Monitoring Optimization 2010”
Nearly half of the U.S. CIOs surveyed by Gartner expect the recession to continue well into 2010. 23% believe business budgets will stabilize and 26% see some recovery and growth. Just 4% predict revenue growth in 2010 above the levels of 2008.
To counter the predicted decrease in the number of skilled IT workers, Gartner is advising CIOs to recruit from outside the IT team, with more CIOs coming from “the business” and with more “users” taking control of their own delivery infrastructure. Some new roles that Gartner predicts will soon fall under the IT umbrella:
- Litigation support managers who will execute discovery exercises for litigators and mediate between legal and IT departments
- Digital archivists who have expertise to access, appraise and preserve records
- Business information managers who have a combined expertise in business and information management
“Over the next two years, business demand for IT-driven growth and innovation will outstrip the supply of qualified people to fulfill job roles and, as a result, traditional IT tasks are moving outside the IT department.”
Debra Logan, Gartner
A quick factoid: people still use short, simple passwords, almost guaranteeing the success of brute force password attacks. Passwords that were compromised in two breaches (Hotmail and Rock You) were analyzed, revealing that in both cases, “123456” was the most common password along with other common arrangements like “qwerty”.
Thank goodness the Winter Olympics will provide a much needed distraction for NBC at 10PM. Even so, I think this article sums up some solid management lessons that can be drawn from the recent drama surrounding the Tonight Show:
Career progression is crucial to retaining top talent. Employees need opportunities to advance – if not here, then there.
- Succession planning is important. Figure out who is likely to retire and have someone in mind to train as their replacement.
- If you’re going to fire someone, just do it already. There’s always the potential that a disgruntled ex-employee will wreak havoc.
- Don’t trash your employee to others – handle disputes in private.
- Don’t send mixed messages – show confidence in the new hire by moving the replaced person out of the way.
While we’re on this, here’s an article from 1994 detailing the history of Leno v. Letterman and how Jay Leno became the host of The Tonight Show.
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January 29th, 2010
January 22nd, 2010 by Valerie Barber
The $7.4 billion Oracle-Sun deal received approval from the European Commission, effectively ensuring Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The deal was announced many moons ago and the US government approved it on August 20, 2009. However, the EC took another five months to perform due diligence to insure the deal would not deter free trade in the 27-country European Union, where 20% of Oracle’s business comes from. The merger still needs approval from regulators in Russia and China (and Michael Widenius, creator of the MySQL database is still opposed), but Oracle said it expects “unconditional approval” from those countries and that it “intends to close the transaction shortly.”
For Government IT, 2010 is expected to be the year for building out strategies to deliver on many of the technologies and philosophies of 2009. Under the direction of the US’s first federal CIO Aneesh Chooprah and the first federal CTO Vivek Kundra, here are some of the predictions fro Government IT in 2010, which seem right on the mark.
- Cybersecurity – despite more reports of breaches, the Department of Homeland Security will make strides toward a solidified cyber offense and defense strategy for both the government and civilians.
- Cloud Computing – The federal government will push data center consolidation, forcing more agencies to think about their own private clouds. GSA’s cloud will provide more shared services via a private cloud.
- IT Procurement – while there are significant changes planned in how agencies buy and deploy IT, concerns around transparency and cybersecurity are stumbling blocks. No-bid contracts and on-the-fly installations are quick, but can hide the details of government spending and include security shortcuts.
Gartner predicts that by 2010, 20% of businesses will own no IT assets, dumping or foregoing assets as they move to the cloud and increase their use of virtualization technologies. As hardware ownership shifts to third parties, they predict major shifts throughout all of the IT hardware industry, which will impact IT careers. Read all of for IT in 2010.
“For example, enterprise IT budgets will either be shrunk or reallocated to more strategic projects; enterprise staff will be either reduced or re-skilled to meet new requirements, and/or hardware distribution will have to change radically to meet the requirements of the new IT hardware buying points.”
Gartner’s key predictions for IT in 2010
VMware’s VMware Go, a tool aimed a making virtualization easier for small- and medium-sized businesses, has been released from beta. VMware Go automates the installation and configuration of the ESXi hypervisor, eliminating the skill and resources barrier SMBs may face. VMware Go is free.
Want to connect to the White House? There’s an app for that. Just in time for the State of the Union address, you can get a free iPhone app that streams live video from the White House, links to the White House blog and the briefing room. Up next: mobile.WhiteHouse.gov, a mobile-ready version of WhiteHouse.gov.
Finally, I came across the “8 IT personality types” that I found pretty funny – probably because I fit one profile and have witnessed all of the others. My favorites:
- The Empty Suit – has memorized most of the important acronyms the surfs Wikipedia after the meeting to find out what everyone was talking about. (Isn’t that what Wikipedia is for?)
- The Scary Sys Admin – your company can’t run without him and he knows it. He’s a good guy, but if you get on his bad side you may be locked out of your computer and possibly your bank accounts.
- The Angry Support Drone – will do what you ask, but no more. Install the printer – yes. Test it to see that it works – no – you just asked to have it installed.
- The Human Roadblock – whatever task or project, the response is, “It can’t be done”. Followed by a painful explanation of why it will fail and ending with “It was a stupid idea to begin with”.
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January 22nd, 2010
January 21st, 2010 by Valerie Barber
Looking to close the technology gap between the public and private sectors, the White House hosted the White House Forum on Modernizing Government, bringing together many top US CEOs and Deputy Secretaries from government agencies. Chief Performance Office Jeffrey Zients noted that one reason for the forum was to allow public agencies to leverage on the leaps in technology that the private sector has made in recent years. “We wanted to find out how they did it,” he said. The forum included breakout sessions on transforming customer service, streamlining operations and maximizing technology ROI.
Federal CIO Vivek Kundra cited a number of improvements over the past year, but also identified some systems that still need to be overhauled, like the paper-based processes for the Veterans Administration’s claims processing and the Patent and Trademark Office that prints and scans applications that it receives electronically. “Today is about unearthing the best ideas in the country,” he said.
Many of the suggestions and input are posted, with more to come, including:
- A critical need for standardization in software and data centers
- A warning about costly customization, when commercial-off-the-shelf solutions often suffices
- Centralizing the federal government’s IT budget
- Requiring periodic IT investment reviews
- Collecting citizen feedback on government services
- Benchmarking
- Breaking big IT projects into smaller chunks
President Obama kicked off the meeting by directing the Office of Management and Budget to provide federal agencies with a plan – including firm milestones and ownership and accountability requirements – to implement some of the CEO’s ideas gathered during the forum.
See who participated on each of the panels.
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January 21st, 2010
January 19th, 2010 by Valerie Barber
With software sales expected to increase 9.7% worldwide, along with a strong rebound in computer hardware sales of 8.2%, Forrester analyst Andrew Bartels says the tech recession is over. The tech recovery in the US is expected to be much stronger than the overall economic recovery, with tech spending growing at more than twice the rate of this year’s gross domestic product. While this is good news, I like Forrester’s note that “smart computing” – a combination of advanced hardware and software technologies that drives new levels of automation and efficiency – will result in a six- to seven-year growth cycle for IT spending.
“New technologies of awareness married to advanced business intelligence analytics make computing smart. Smart Computing rests on new foundation technologies such as service-oriented architecture, server and storage virtualization, cloud computing and unified communications. 2010 marks the beginning of this next phase of technology advancement.”
Andrew Bartels
While this is good news that falls in line with the mainstreaming of virtualization and the momentum of cloud computing, it faces the realities of recent surveys that show data centers are understaffed and the growing difficulty in hiring qualified staff. The good news is IT blogger Paul Venezia feels that IT is getting too easy because everything “just works”, and when it doesn’t, you Google the problem to find someone who’s posted a resolution. Let’s hope there’s a rapid convergence of talent and resources that catches up to the opportunities of Smart Computing.
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January 19th, 2010
January 15th, 2010 by Valerie Barber
While we all like to “do the right thing”, we can take comfort in knowing that the added benefit of saving greenbacks is still a strong motivator – even in making decisions about going green. In its quarterly report on Green IT, Forrester has found that saving money is the motivating factor for implementing Green IT solutions. Respondents said they are interested in driving down energy costs (66%) and reducing other IT-related expenses (42%). Just 16% said regulatory compliance was the driver. The report indicates a renewed focus on green technologies as the recession begins to ease.
With data centers accounting for about 3% of all energy consumed in the U.S., it’s no wonder the Department of Energy has granted $47 million in stimulus money (that will be matched by $70 million in private industry donations) to find ways to make data centers more green. The money will be distributed among 14 projects whose goal is to improve data center efficiency through innovative components, better power supplies and improved cooling technologies. Award winners include Yahoo, HP and SeaMicro.
“Our goal is to double the energy efficiency in data centers within five years,” Brad Wurtz, President and CEO of Power Assure that was awarded $5 million in DOE grant money
Greenpeace awarded HP its “Best in Show” at last week’s CES for its 8000f Elite Ultra Slim Desktop PC that has a host of environmentally friendly features. HP has come a long way since Greenpeace staged a protest last year that included painting “Hazardous Products” on the roof of the headquarters building and William Shatner’s voicemail to employees asking about HP’s promise of a toxic-free computer by 2009. Now Greenpeace is on Samsung, who they say is tailing leaders like Apple and Sony in phasing out toxic chemicals in its products.
Just as data centers are becoming more complex and harder to manage, a Symantec survey finds a large number of IT executives report that their data centers are understaffed. With 31% reporting a reduction in headcount in 2009, 16% of respondents said they are extremely understaffed and 34% said somewhat understaffed. Most companies reported having trouble finding enough money and enough qualified applicants to maintain healthy IT staff levels. Some of the cost-saving strategies include cross-training IT staff, automating routine tasks, server virtualization and consolidation, data center consolidation, chargeback, cloud computing and outsourcing. View the report here.
On January 28, 2010, the Federal Trade Commission is hosting a public roundtable discussion, “Exploring Privacy”, on the privacy challenges of cloud computing and other 21st century technologies. You can listen to the webcast as they discuss protecting consumer privacy while supporting beneficial uses of the information and technological innovation.
Mark your calendars now so you won’t forget to celebrate some notable 25th anniversaries in 2010. In addition to the Cray-2, registration of the first domain name (symbolics.com), free software and the MIT Media Lab, other notables that hit the quarter-century milestone include:
- AOL
- “Back to the Future”
- Blockbuster stores
- New Coke
- Discovery Channel
- Windows 1.0
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January 15th, 2010
January 15th, 2010 by Julia Lim
USS Carl Vinson
Want to know how you can help Haiti? Check out Facebook.
The federal government is using the social media tool to communicate a variety of ways in which it’s responding to the crisis in Haiti and how you can get involved. The State Department’s Facebook page provides contact information for people wanting to donate money, provide assistance or find US citizens in Haiti.
Even the Twitter crowd is getting into the act, tweeting about the USS Carl Vinson which was dispatched to support relief efforts. And Facebook itself has set up a site to help its members find ways to help.
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January 15th, 2010
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