Last Friday, I had the privilege of hearing Henry Sienkiewicz, Vice Chief Information Assurance Executive for the Defensive Information Systems Agency (DISA), at a luncheon hosted by the Northern Virginia chapter of the Air Forces Communications and Electronics Association. In his opening remarks, Mr. Sienkiewicz identified three vectors challenging their cybersecurity delivery: budget decreases, strong demand from the services, and how cybersecurity is being conducted to defend and protect the mission. My five key takeaways are the following...

DLT Solutions sponsored last month’s InformationWeek’s GovCloud. As the public sector continues migrating workloads to the cloud, Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) are gaining acceptance and increasing traction.

Children won’t be the only ones trick-or-treating this month. Last year, federal agencies reported an estimated 3,574 incidents every month in 2011 according to the Government Accountability Office. The same office also said incidents reported have increased nearly 680% in the last six years. Due to rising cyber terrorism and the need for increased cyber security, President Obama has designated October “National Cyber Security Awareness Month”.

Do you have questions about FedRAMP? What is FedRAMP? How will FedRAMP impact my agency? What do I need to know about FedRAMP to procure cloud computing services? These are only a few of the many questions we are hearing from customers. To address these questions and others, Shamun Mahmud, the security architect of the DLT Cloud Advisory Group, recently published a white paper entitled The Benefits of FedRAMP. The white paper details how federal IT agencies are being impacted by the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP).

With this post, I wrap up this three part series covering the findings of the GAO’s report on the overall progress of the Cloud First initiative. If you missed the first to parts, you can find them here and here respectively Quick recap: Earlier this month the Government Accountability Office released the results of their study on the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Cloud First policy. The GAO assessed the progress selected agencies made and identified challenges they are facing in implementing the policy.

And just like that, Shamun is back with his expanded thoughts on the GAO’s Cloud First findings. If you missed yesterday’s review of the first of the seven findings, click here. Quick recap: Earlier this month the Government Accountability Office released the results of their study on the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Cloud First policy. The GAO assessed the progress of selected agencies and identified challenges they are facing in implementing the policy. Shamun covers the next three findings in today’s post and will wrap up the series with the remaining for later this week.

As Featured on Technology Marketing Corporation’s Website, TMCnet.com The General Services Administration (GSA) is in the midst of launching an ambitious program designed to accelerate the safe adoption of cloud services within the U.S. Government. That program, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), is a collaborative effort between the GSA, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Department of Defense (DOD). FedRAMP will ensure cloud service providers (CSP) maintain adequate information security; reduce duplicated effort; decrease risk management costs; and streamline the procurement of cloud services.

In the ongoing saga of Federal adoption of clouds one of the sticky wickets has been the requirement by law that all Federal information systems comply with the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002, commonly referred to as FISMA. In a very small nutshell FISMA requires that information systems comply with security guidelines that are the responsibility of the National Institute of Standards (NIST) and that these systems are monitored for vulnerabilities.