The roots of the current Defense Department information technology culture can be traced to the Brooks Act of 1965. This legislation reflected a mainframe view of computing. Its purpose was to limit the growth of data centers to constrain costs. The Brooks Act was based on the assumption that if the General Services Administration would [...]

The best way to understand cloud computing is to view it from the standpoint of a “workload stack” that describes the structure of all systems. Various vendors have organized computing differently, but all can be represented by means of a six-layer structure. The ultimate scope of cloud computing, when all information technologies would become potentially [...]

According to the DoD CIO the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNET) connects approximately two thousand DoD locations, with up to 500,000 users. Every SIPRNET connection is physically protected and cryptographically isolated. Each authorized user must have a SECRET-level clearance or higher. * Following the unauthorized release of classified documents (e.g. Wiki Leaks) the Director [...]

A small New Zealand firm has just published a list of “cloudonomics” principles. The list offers useful guidance how to think about the adoption of cloud computing. * The following is a redacted version of “cloudonomics”: Cloudonomics Principle #1: Cloud services cost less even though their unit costs are more.  Although cloud services unit cost are [...]

The U.S, Government Accountability Office (GAO) in its March 2011 report GAO-11-318SP identified opportunities to reduce the potential duplication in government programs.  These programs are usually managed by separate bureaucracies and will most likely operate separate databases, separate servers and possibly separate data centers or server farms. We have extracted from the GAO a sample [...]