What’s New This Week:
Moving to the (Hybrid) Cloud
It took a few days, but we’re finally not feeling like zombies after the Halloween sugar binge. Speaking of dead things, NASA has put to rest its Kepler space telescope, which is known for discovering more than 2,600 planets outside our solar system over the past nine years. RIP Kepler, the planet hunter. You’ll be missed.
Meanwhile, IBM was on cloud nine last week following its acquisition of open-source software developer Red Hat in a record-breaking cash deal worth $34 billion. IBM’s president and CEO Ginni Rometty called it “a game-changer” for the company. As Red Hat becomes a distinct unit of IBM’s hybrid cloud division, the tech giant is expected to get a boost in its cloud portfolio for both the private and public sectors. That’s something IBM didn’t have until now: Red Hat’s expertise to create top-tier hybrid cloud offerings.
At the forefront of the IBM/Red Hat deal is the federal government—the perfect customer for hybrid cloud solutions. Government agencies tend to be risk-averse with data and often rely on legacy systems, which makes moving to the cloud difficult. Red Hat’s presence in the federal space has grown significantly in recent years and IBM has set its sights on those government contracts.
BGOV’s Chris Cornillie explains more in this week’s exclusive story.
With the White House’s new Cloud Smart strategy in place, federal agencies are under pressure to evolve with the times and incorporate cloud computing into their IT modernization efforts. That’s already the case for several agencies like the Defense Department, Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, and NASA, which have been the biggest buyers of cloud services since 2014, according to Bloomberg Government’s September report. Cloud services contract obligations were expected to reach approximately $6.5 billion in fiscal 2018, up from $4.9 billion in fiscal 2017, the report found.
And let’s not forget about data privacy — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg can’t seem to catch a break. Two different parliamentary committees from the U.K. and Canada issued an international joint summons for Zuckerberg, asking him to testify and answer questions about Facebook’s data privacy practices. They’re also seeking more details about the social media platform’s digital policies and information governance practices. Both committees said they’ll publish final reports as a result by the end of December.
Hungry for more? Your weekly dose of key issues affecting federal technology leaders awaits.
