This week the Obama administration put out a new initiative for Big Data. Six agencies (DoD, DoE, DARPA, NIH, NSF, and USGS) have dedicated over $200 million to ensure this is a successful program. John Holdren, assistant to the president, stated that many more agencies will be involved in the future. NASA and NOAA will be the next agencies to enter the big data push. These are especially important because of the quantity of data they both collect. The government plans to close over 450 data centers nation wide. This will require data centers to be more robust in all aspects. This incluudes server’s space availability to meeting all cyber security standards. With fewer data centers the new data centers will store and process larger amounts of data. This will also allow for agencies to have better communication and be more efficient in their efforts.

FedRAMP (Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program) is led by GSA and is a soon-to-be mandatory government wide program that standardizes the government’s approach to authorizing cloud services for use by federal agencies and monitoring those services to ensure that they continue to meet federal cybersecurity requirements.Once a service goes through the initial FedRAMP authorization process, it will get a stamp of approval that all agencies can use to sign off on the service’s ability to meet federal security requirements. FedRAMP is still in pre-launch stage. The launch of its initial operational capabilities is scheduled for June 2012, and the focus will be on infrastructure as a service and e-mail as service. Full operational capabilities are scheduled for the second quarter of fiscal 2013. At this stage, FedRamp will include more diverse products and services. By 2014 the government will move to full implementation with on-demand scalability and all federal agencies will be required to use the FedRAMP process for assessments.

Identity management solutions safely guard and control user identities and privileges. Single Sign-On (SSO) enables organizations to provide authorized user access to systems and services providing efficient management of the entire identity lifecycle. This includes assessing, planning, implementing, auditing, and maintaining identities and access privileges. Government agencies are taking an aggressive stance of migrating to the cloud which promises to reduce the cost of delivering government services in this fiscally conservative environment. Cloud Identity management plays a central role in securing cloud deployments.

Reports have surfaced this month indicating that government officials will soon be able to receive classified materials through smartphones. The phones will operate using a specially designed version of Android software, which is being developed alongside Google as part of a multi-agency project that contractors have been hearing rumors of for the past year.

Recently, there has been a shift in the traditional way government manages mobile devices. Many of today’s U.S. federal agencies are moving from RIM’s blackberry devices to Apple’s iPhone. One reason for this movement is that government employees are tired of being forced to use their out of date government issued Blackberry’s. They have been asking their IT management to allow them to use their personal Apple devices at work for some time now. Agencies are now seeing that Apple products are more technologically sound and they are starting to make the switch. A few weeks ago, the General Services Administration (GSA) decided to distribute iPhone’s (along with some android devices) to a portion of their employee base which clocks in at 17,000. In response, GSA Chief Information Officer, Casey Coleman, stated, “We actively seek to be progressive in our adoption of new technologies so that we can learn the lessons which will inform our client and customer agencies as they seek to go down a similar path". Many view this decision as creating a domino effect that is spreading to other federal agencies.

Each year, business leaders are challenged to develop and revise strategic plans for their organization and to think through the specific tactics to achieve goals. Often these plans for the future state of the organization include thinking about the skills needed. An organization can hire new skills, but often it is more effective (on the basis of cost and productivity) to invest in leadership training. Almost any leadership training can be enhanced and reinforced with an eMentor program which connects people based upon their current and future skills, their needs and job requirements and the personality and world view.