Cloud standards, SEWP protests and NGA gamification

NIST cloud roadmap unveiled

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has published the final version of its government cloud computing roadmap.

“The roadmap focuses on strategic and tactical objectives to support the federal government’s accelerated adoption of cloud computing,” NIST said.

The final version, the product of feedback on earlier drafts collected as part of a 2 1/2 year effort, added two priorities, performance and accessibility, to the three that were included in the draft version -- security, interoperability and portability.

“The urgency is driven by rapid deployment of cloud computing in response to financial incentives,” the report said. “Standards are critical to ensure cost-effective and easy migration, to ensure that mission-critical requirements can be met and to reduce the risk that sizable investments may become prematurely obsolete.”

The report lists 10 requirements for cloud adoption standards, each of which has a list of “priority action plans” with target completion dates. Research teams from industry, academia and government are working on these plans and will present their findings at different workshops, the Cloud Computing Forum and through publications.

The 10 requirements are:

1. International voluntary consensus-based standards.
2. Solutions for high-priority security requirements which are technically decoupled from organizational policy decisions.
3. Technical specifications to enable development of service-legal agreements.
4. Clear and consistently categorized cloud services.
5. Frameworks to support federated community clouds.
6. Updated organization policy that reflects the cloud computing business and technology model.
7. Defined unique government requirements and solutions.
8. Collaborative parallel “future cloud” development initiatives.
9. Defined and implemented reliability design goals.
10. Defined and implemented cloud service metrics.

First SEWP V protests are filed

Washington Technology reports that four companies have filed protests over NASA's $20 billion SEWP V IT contracting vehicle.

Unicom Government Inc., a contracting incumbent on the SEWP IV GWAC that ends Oct. 31, is among the protestors, as are BahFed Corp., NCS Technologies Inc. and KPaul Properties.

More protests are expected. NASA received 233 proposals and has made awards to 73 companies for SEWP V.

NGA posts open gamification software to GitHub

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency recently released open-source gamification software to GitHub, the collaborative software development environment, GCN reports.

The gamification-server software tracks gamification elements (badges, points, tags) for work pages or apps and provides a framework for providing awards/points to users or teams. It can run either standalone or integrated with other web-based applications.