2015-01-15: The Winter 2015 Federal Cloud Computing Summit

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On January 14th-15th, I attended the Federal Cloud Computing Summit in Washington, D.C., a recurring event in which I have participated in the past. In my continuing role as the MITRE-ATARC Collaboration Session lead, I assisted the host organization, the Advanced Technology And Research Center (ATARC) in organizing and run the MITRE-ATARC Collaboration Sessions. The summit is designed to allow Government representatives to meeting and collaborate with industry, academic, and other Government cloud computing practitioners on the current challenges in cloud computing.

The collaboration sessions continue to be highly valued within the government and industry. The Winter 2015 Summit had over 400 government or academic registrants and more than 100 industry registrants. The whitepaper summarizing the Summer 2014 collaboration sessions is now available.

A discussion of FedRAMP and the future of the policies was held in a Government-only session at 11:00 before the collaboration sessions began.
At its conclusion, the collaboration sessions began, with four sessions focusing on the following topics.
  • Challenge Area 1: When to choose Public, Private, Government, or Hybrid clouds?
  • Challenge Area 2: The umbrella of acquisition: Contracting pain points and best practices
  • Challenge Area 3: Tiered architecture: Mitigating concerns of geography, access management, and other cloud security constraints
  • Challenge Area 4: The role of cloud computing in emerging technologies
Because participants are protected by Chathan House Rule, I cannot elaborate on the Government representation or discussions in the collaboration sessions. MITRE will continue its practice of releasing a summary document after the Summit (for reference, see the Summer 2014 and Winter 2013 summit whitepapers).

On January 15th, I attended the Summit which is a conference-style series of panels and speakers with an industry trade-show held before the event and during lunch. At 3:25-4:10, I moderated a panel of Government representatives from each of the collaboration sessions in a question-and-answer session about the outcomes from the previous day's collaboration sessions.

To follow along on Twitter, you can refer to the Federal Cloud Computing Summit Handle (@cloudfeds), the ATARC Handle (@atarclabs), and the #cloudfeds hashtag.

This was the fourth Federal Summit event in which I have participated, including the Winter 2013 and Summer 2014 Cloud Summits and the 2013 Big Data Summit. They are great events that the Government participants have consistently identified as high-value. The events also garner a decent amount of press in the federal news outlets and at MITRE. Please refer to the fedsummits.com list of press for the most recent articles about the summit.

We are continuing to expand and improve the summits, particularly with respect to the impact on academia. Stay tuned for news from future summits!

--Justin F. Brunelle

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