As policies from the new federal chief information officer, Steven VanRoekel, become better known, cloud computing technology is proving more important than ever. VanRoekel has pledged not only to continue the Cloud First policy established by his predecessor, Vivek Kundra, but also to expand it with an additional initiative known as Future First.

When Congress passed the fiscal 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) last week, it may have done more for cloud computing than any other organization to date.

The current frugality push across government presents a special opportunity for one agency in particular. The General Services Administration, which outfits other federal agencies with everything from purchase cards to cloud computing know-how, sees today's belt-tightening as a new "sweet spot," in the words of Federal Acquisition Service Commissioner Steven Kempf.

Government agencies at all levels are examining how to use cloud services as a means of upgrading their systems while maximizing value. Moving to cloud can allow agencies to condense sprawling IT systems, offer more mobility options and manage legacy systems. However, along with all of this convenience comes a significant security headache. Many agencies are still working through how to handle cloud security and nowhere is this more important than law enforcement. CivSource spoke with Jeff Gould, CEO & Director of Research, Peerstone Research, about how enforcement agencies are managing cloud security.

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) wants to migrate its in-house telephony infrastructure to the cloud in yet another move supporting the federal government's push to decrease costs and increase efficiencies through cloud computing.

In today's era of budget austerity, every federal agency must improve processes, cut costs and deliver value quickly. BPM (business process management) is one technique that can help develop applications that achieve these objectives.

Just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong in 2011. From embarrassing smash-and-grab attacks to advanced persistent threats, from high-profile breaches to the advent of militarized malware, the bad guys demonstrated repeatedly an ability to adapt to the rapidly evolving landscape of cyberspace.

As far as legislation goes, it was a stunning turn of events: Tucked inside the fiscal 2012 National Defense Authorization Act is language halting some of the Defense Department’s most ambitious IT efforts.

Verizon Federal Inc. and General Dynamics Information Technology are among companies whose cloud computing services and products will be vetted first by federal experts under a new mandatory security assessment program.

After more than two years of trying, the City of Los Angeles has abandoned plans to migrate its police department to Google's hosted email and office application platform saying the service cannot meet certain FBI security requirements.