While cloud adoption is progressing at all levels of government – federal, state, and local – there are also regular reminders of the challenges. Cloud security is frequently cited as the main cause for concern, but an overwhelming two thirds of agency staff recently surveyed by Accenture said their agency lacked the necessary skilled staff to execute the Cloud First strategy.

According to the federal managers surveyed:

Wait a minute…is that even possible…information overload in the cloud?  I thought the cloud was an endless and infinite container of information we can click-to-get whatever data, video or images we desire, whenever and wherever we want?

Most agencies aren’t interested in competing in the Amazing Race to the cloud, but there’s no doubt that the government is starting to embrace the cloud. Drivers include the cost savings and the increased agility that cloud computing can provide. However, this movement towards the cloud frequently leaves today’s IT professionals tasked with managing applications in a challenging environment: the hybrid data center.

First established in 2011, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) was designed to streamline how agencies make the move to cloud computing. With its standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud service provider (CSP) products and services, FedRAMP was intended to save 30-40% of government costs using a “do once, use many times” framework.

But it didn’t quite pan out that way.

To enable our backups inside AWS, we have been leveraging Architect NBU within AWS.

Our environment above consist of a NetBackup Master/Media server.

EC2 instances of clients. Backing up to S3, all within one enclave.

Veritas NetBackup and Amazon Web Services combined has given us the capability to grow a backup infrastructure immensely with reliability and efficiently across multiple virtual environments. To, from and within the cloud.

2015 was a prolific year for cybercrime. In the public sector, OPM was the banner breach (full cost as yet unknown, but the feds are spending $133 million on credit monitoring alone).  Meanwhile in the private sector, hacking cost the average American firm $15.4 million per year, with the more costly cybercrime carried out by malicious insiders, DDoS and web-based attacks.

Over the last several years, great efforts have been made to implement the US Federal Government’s “Cloud First” strategic initiative to develop, promote, and streamline the “on ramp process” for Federal agencies to adopt and migrate to cloud architecture through Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP).

Well, not exactly.  Except for whatever delicious things you may have shopped for and purchased on Amazon, then no, Amazon is nowhere to be found in your body.  However, some really interesting research is taking place in the Amazon Web Services Cloud by NIH and the results could help your stomach lining stay healthy.

I’ve recently returned from my first AWS re:Invent conference and yes, I feel initiated.  Not only were there over 24,000 attendees and over 250 sponsors, but there were 8 new services announced by Amazon including Internet of Things, Analytics, Databases, Storage & Content Delivery, and Mobile Services, just to name a few.