Much like NASA has done with its space program, the agency is relinquishing its role in cloud computing development to the hands of private sector providers.

Just a week after the White House released the new Digital Government Strategy, agencies get some pointers on how they can proceed with the approach that could fundamentally change how the entire federal government delivers services to citizens.

The Defense Department plans to have an enterprise mobile network supporting classified and unclassified communications at least partially up and running by the end of the year

The Obama administration and a private-sector working group have announced a cooperative initiative to combat malicious botnets, which are being called a growing threat to the online economy and national security.

Today, I'm pleased to announce some great news for government customers in the United States. First, we're introducing Office 365 for Government. Office 365 for Government is a new multi-tenant service that stores US government data in a segregated community cloud. Like other Office 365 offerings, it includes productivity and collaboration services including Exchange Online, Lync Online, SharePoint Online, and Office Professional Plus. Customers can contact their Microsoft representative for details and to explore the service. We also know that security and privacy play a big role in any decision to move to the cloud. Today, Office 365 supports the most rigorous global and regional standards such as ISO 27001, SAS70 Type II, EU Safe Harbor, EU Model Clauses, the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the US Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), and the US Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). To meet evolving needs, we also plan to support IPv6 in Office 365 for Government by September of this year, and we're taking steps to soon support Criminal Justice Information Security (CJIS) policies. We look forward to working with our government customers on these initiatives in the coming months.

After a decade of slow adoption, an increasing number of public and private health care providers are moving to implement electronic health records (EHR) management solutions, including information sharing capabilities. Using cloud-based and mobile services, these technologies have the potential to revolutionize the health care industry by accelerating the exchange and delivery of information to providers and patients. Still, recent breaches of patients’ personal health information (PHI) in violation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) highlight the danger of adopting these technologies without proper consideration of the risks at hand. In implementing new EHR management technologies, health care providers must be careful to implement the security and privacy measures necessary to ensure the confidentiality and availability of patients’ personal health records.

Cloud computing today is no longer a buzzword associated with universities or advanced technology organisations at the bleeding edge of innovation. It is now a mainstream sourcing model that most organisations are looking to as part of their broader IT strategy.

Some employees thought they were pretty sneaky downloading confidential data from corporate computers to thumb drives days before they turned in their resignations and bolted to a competitor.

The FedRAMP cloud security initiative took another step towards its goal of becoming operational in June with the recent announcement of approved third-party assessment organizations (3PAOs). Launched by the Obama administration in December, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) aims to cut the cost and time spent on agency cloud authorizations by setting a standard approach to cloud security assessments. Dynamic Research Corporation, an Andover, Mass.-based provider of IT solutions to government customers, is one of the newly minted 3PAOs. In this interview, Todd Coen, vice president of DRC’s homeland security solutions division, talks about how his firm will evaluate cloud providers’ security, the FedRAMP process, and the program’s potential impact.

As the Obama administration moves to implement a broad-ranging mobile computing initiative throughout the government, agency CIOs need to integrate forward-looking policies to ensure that mobile devices and the data and applications that reside on them are insulated from both internal and external threats from the outset, according to a security expert.