Cloud Ventures

The previous blog talked about Municipalities beginning to move into a mode where they not only buy in Cloud services, but they also become a seller of them too. Research analyst IDC calls these ‘Cloud Hubs’ in new insights they are revealing about how this effect is already occuring in the USA, with municipalities buying from ‘upstream’ State-level providers, and also selling to them too. It’s clear there is a very powerful story about the potential for new revenue sources and local economic development, as well as a new mode of IT. Government Cloud Hubs The fundamental building blocks of the type of platform required for this strategy include: Self-service portals and platform automation - For example Cisco has just made two acquisitions to fill out their products here, for their Cisco Cloud Portal, part of their Cisco Intelligent Automation for the Cloud program.... (more)

PaaS Best Practices : Platform for Hybrid SaaS

The GC Community Cloud ITSS documentation stipulates the Cloud service specifications that the Government of Canada plans to deploy, and can be used by external commercial providers as well as internally by Shared Services Canada users. They provide technical design blueprints for security configurations to ensure Cloud environments are compliant with Government of Canada standards. Primarily they can be used as industry-wide product specifications because they’re based on the NIST models that are now universally recognized as the default Cloud Best Practices, and relate to how s... (more)

Digital Fuel for the 21st Century

As part 4 of our GovCloud series, we can build on the previous blog about PaaS (Platform as a Service) and highlight how one implementation option for this is Salesforce.com, via their Force.com service. * This is one of the key topics of our upcoming MaaS webinar. Salesforce.com recently declared their ambitions for the public sector with the hiring of Vivek Kundra, previously Whitehouse CIO who led the whole Cloud First revolution. This will have an accelerating impact not just for Salesforce.com but for the Government Cloud market as a whole. It will catalyze a big interest and... (more)

Building GovCloud Services, Part 1 – Product Model

One of our primary focus and service areas is ‘GovCloud’ – Government Cloud Computing. In a nutshell this means building new Cloud services in line with the best practice models from NIST, the primary source of defining Cloud Computing reference architectures, comprised of the following main parts: Business Use Cases Product Model Cloud Identity Apps Store Business Use Cases As highlighted in the first introductory blog for this series the NIST solutioning process is based on the ‘Business Use Cases‘ they are developing. This includes scenarios such as Email hosting, E-Discovery an... (more)

Shifting to Analytics-Driven IT Operations

by Sasha Gilenson Today Business Intelligence (BI) teams are applying analytics tools in order to provide business with a view into the massive amounts of data that is being collected throughout an organization. Companies apply these analytical tools to Big Data, in order to improve their competitive edge, by identifying the seemingly hidden trends, financial and operational patterns, customer relationships, business opportunities, buying opportunities and information that was has been out of view. On the IT side, BSM initiatives have been implemented to ensure that IT is well-... (more)