Last week, CGI participated in a cloud computing forum sponsored by Public Sector Partners in collaboration with the State of California. The event, “Defining the Cloud for Government,” was attended by more than 1,000 government technology professionals.

CGI served as a member of the forum’s advisory board and contributed our extensive experience as a full-service cloud provider for commercial and government organizations globally.  As board members, CGI facilitated the invitation of General Services Administration (GSA) representatives to come to the forum in Sacramento to share their strategy and experiences in procuring and implementing their own federal cloud environment.

California leadership in attendance enthusiastically took the opportunity to engage in multiple education sessions with Dave McClure, Associate Administrator, and Bajinder Paul, Deputy Associate Administrator, both from the GSA Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies (view the video of their technology track session). Key takeaways from GSA’s breakout sessions include:

• The Industrial Revolution of Big Data is here and is fueling organizational needs to move to the cloud. Data truly is the “flint” for the next 25 years. Since Big Data is not new to government, what has changed? Volume, velocity and variety are all increasing, and the cloud helps us manage this data cheaper, faster and greener.
• The cloud operational model promotes a healthier provider-consumer relationship.
• Like most paradigm shifts, moving to the cloud requires a cultural change!
• The government cloud provider’s key concerns include:
• Legal, policy compliance
• Security vulnerabilities
• Privacy concerns
• Business viability of the provider
• Disaster recovery capabilities of the provider
• General maturity of the operational model

As security considerations are a core piece of the cloud discussion, forum attendees also were very interested in the U.S. government’s FedRAMP cloud security authorization program as a way to address some of those concerns. FedRAMP standardizes the approach to security assessment, authorization and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. CGI is one of the first cloud service providers to gain FedRAMP authorization to deliver U.S. government-wide cloud services. Learn more about this program at www.FedRAMP.gov.