Not only does the U.S. government implement top security standards for many U.S. corporations, it is also held to the highest degree of security and expected to be virtually indestructible. Thus, government agencies must ensure they have a solid security foundation of backend IT controls, and auditing is critical to an institution's overall security infrastructure. With recent high-profile data breaches, firewalls and end-point security controls aren't enough anymore. This session will discuss how government IT departments can establish the key elements of the security foundation with minimal disruption to the computing infrastructure, by addressing critical security issues.

SOA may be a popular buzzword and talk of actively practicing SOA is spoken of in the same vein as teenage frivolity ("everyone is doing it"), but SOA is actually a delicate balancing act of managing pragmatic concessions again long term vision. In this session delegates will be presented with use cases that illustrate key forks in the road for an SOA project and the impacts of taking each fork.

Tactical Cloud Computing refers to the use of cloud computing technology and techniques for the support of localized and short-lived information access and processing requirements. Use cases could include:

• “Cloudbursting” to support cyclic data processing requirements
• Establishing a cloud-based collaboration environment in order to coordinate firefighting resources during a wildfire
• Virtually binding shipboard IT infrastructures in order to create a battlegroup infrastructure-as-a-service platform
• Virtually binding land vehicle based servers and storage resources into a battlefield data center
• Dynamic provisioning of virtual cloud-based servers in order to automate exploitation and dissemination of unmanned air vehicle (UAV) streaming video feeds

This discussion panel will explore how defense, homeland security and law enforcement organizations are looking to leverage this new and exciting IT capability.

This session will demonstrate how government organizations can offer public data sets cost effectively yet create tremendous impact in the private sector. For example, private clouds such as Amazon's Web Services (AWS) are now used to host st public data sets free of charge and available on demand. Along with elastic compute services, AWS users can create private copies to combine with their own data for analysis. From census data used to identify target areas for private investment to mortgage data being analyzed to help manage bad debt, the proliferation of readily accessible public data is becoming a key economic driver.

Case Study - February 29, 2008 marked the start of change in the Department of Defense's management of its Major Defense Acquisition Program (MDAP) portfolio. On that day, authoritative Earned Value Management and Unit Cost information was available, on demand, to support DoD Secretariat decision making on 12 MDAPs totaling $103B. Today, the capability provides broader cost, schedule, and performance information for 37 MDAPs totaling $1.2T. This effort combines Departmental and data governance with SOA to improve the timeliness and authoritativeness of critical program oversight data, which permits continued operation of stakeholders' own business systems, while standardizing the available data and external interfaces.

Cloud Computing is generating an incredible amount of excitement and interest - it will be the most transformative technology in decades and heralds an evolution in computing that has virtually every analyst group declaring that Cloud Computing as the new computing paradigm. In response to concerns about information access and usage, by both public and private sectors, Cloud Computing has spawned an entirely new body of law, generated new policies, created new standards and raised new concerns.

So how can public and private sector companies leverage the enumerable and quantifiable benefits of the cloud, while maintaining total control over their private and business sensitive data? This session will discuss the issues related to Data Privacy, Residency, and Security in the cloud, and compare some of the approaches and strategies organizations are taking to allow them to adopt the cloud, yet retain the control of their sensitive data.

New frontiers are exciting and full of seemingly limitless possibilities. Building momentum and gaining widespread support for new frontiers, on the other hand, is always a challenge. Perhaps one of the most important factors in gaining traction and mainstream adoption is in the area of standards. Countless historical examples exist for this reality, from railroads to electricity to manufacturing. In this informative and entertaining talk, industry expert Kyle Gabhart will explore the subject of Cloud Standards. Do they exist? Can we trust them? Are we building our enterprise solutions on mere vapors? Kyle will explore these topics and many more.

A full description of this General Session to be given by 3Tera's Chairman & CEO will be posted shortly.

PerspecSys provides Cloud Data Governance solutions that address the critical issues of Privacy/Residency/Security in the Cloud. The PerspecSys Cloud Data Governance (PRS) solutions allow organizations to adopt Cloud-based applications, while maintaining total control of their private and sensitive data, thereby helping to ensure that they are compliant with the legislative, regulatory and policy requirements imposed by their geography, industry, or company.

Tighter budgets and increased oversight are driving significant reporting requirements for IT compliance. From security and operations to software audits and virtualization, agencies are under increasing pressure to improve transparency into their IT environments across all technologies and processes. With growing architectural complexity and unpredictable vendor consolidation, keeping up with the constant demands for information can overwhelm any agency. Creating and maintaining a credible IT baseline - hardware, software, physical and virtual assets - is the foundation for successful IT compliance. This session will discuss strategies and practices for successful IT baselining and show how government agencies have addressed IT compliance in effective ways.

An Open Source SOA Roadmap is a SOA governance stone that kills two birds - spaghetti enterprise architectures and endless midddleware license fees. Open Source SOA Roadmaps orchestrate SOA and open source technologies/techniques into a concrete transition action plan. Where that plan is more likely to be funded and deliver tangible business value - in shorter time frames.

As the pressure mounts to meet more stringent budgets, CIOs need to find the proper balance between transforming IT and reducing costs. IT operational costs continue to increase as a percentage of overall IT dollars. At the same time, IT is being pressured to provide an innovative, competitive advantage for the business. Will the Enterprise Cloud support both? Can the Enterprise Cloud make infrastructure operations faster, easier, cheaper, and safer while also unleashing the transformative creativity of the workforce? Will the Cloud be both a strong efficiency play as well as the Infrastructure’s Ultimate Revenge by positioning IT to be the accelerator of corporate strategy instead of its bottleneck?

This fast-moving discussion panel will match emerging federal cloud computing requirements against emerging capabilities from cloud providers to reveal the likely course of action for Federal decision makers. It will be moderated by Jeremy Geelan, GovIT Expo Conference Chair

A detailed session description for this presentation by 3Tera will be posted shortly

Cloud computing leverages a myriad of Virtualization technologies. In this session by Harry Foxwell of Sun Microsystems Federal, the speakers will review and discuss the benefits and trade-offs of applying the various virtualization techniques within the cloud.

This session presents a framework for driving SOA initiatives into Cloud such that you can actually achieve a double play of business benefits from both. SOA and Cloud are complementary initiatives, and they build on and support one another. The session will present SOA and Cloud patterns that show the linkages of SOA to Cloud, and how to accelerate from SOA into Cloud.

This session will discuss best practices for implementing a secure on-premise and cloud deployment mix, challenges organizations should anticipate when shifting to the cloud, and the key things any government organization needs to consider when building out a collaboration strategy in the cloud. Attendees will take away key tips for designing a next-generation collaboration deployment model that connects both government employees and citizens to tools in the cloud that enable the necessary interactions that promote progress and productivity in today's government environment.

Now that the Obama administration has pegged cloud computing as the next evolution in government technology, it's important to understand the entire scope of the cloud computing spectrum from storage to security. When looking at the overall size of the government from IT management to remote locations across the entire United States adopting an efficient cloud to cloud approach can be difficult and sending data can be become time consuming with extensive latency issues. Enter: cloud acceleration, the speeding up of applications through the cloud. In this session delegates will learn about the technology behind cloud acceleration and the methods to deployment within the federal space.

In this session Rich Wolski will present Eucalyptus - Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs to Useful Systems - an open source software infrastructure that implements IaaS-style cloud computing. The goal of Eucalyptus is to allow sites with existing clusters and server infrastructure to host an elastic computing service that is interface-compatible with Amazon's AWS, but can also support multiple interfaces such as Google's AppEngine and the Sun Cloud open API. His session will focus on specific features of the system that are designed to enable rapid development, prototyping, and deployment of local computing clouds, particularly for debugging and/or application development purposes. We will discuss our experiences in building and supporting open source cloud infrastructure and point to potential future directions that we believe will enable greater innovation.

Threat and fraud was once the sole domain of men in trench coats. However, they are now found in areas including employee screening, benefit claims, identity theft, and many more. Clearly, these areas are still at the forefront of Government homeland security, services and benefits efforts, but this session will bring the discussion to the everyday business environment. It could be used for building National ID system, issuing Government services & benefits IDs like Passports, PDS Ration Cards, watching borders, improving the intelligence system. Come join the discussion for an exploration of the IBM initiative for Trusted Identities Realization for Government.

Cloud computing is all the rage, yet there are significant challenges to embracing the cloud with the goal of security and Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) compliance. Among these barriers are defining system audit boundaries, who is responsible for audits, and how federal agencies can achieve security in a shared cloud computing environment. This session will clear up FISMA security compliance misconceptions and obstacles to cloud computing and will offer participants strategies for synching their FISMA compliance framework to the cloud.

Continuity of Operations Planning has been a priority of governmental and non-governmental organizations for a number of years. Hosted Virtual Desktops and VDI have become a popular method for providing basic end-user computing in the event of a COOP outage. However, most VDI implementations fail to take user environment settings and data into consideration. If users are moved from highly customized personal environments to generic desktops, seamless continuous operations may suffer as users are unable to adapt to their temporary work environment. In this session, GovIT Expo delegates will learn about emerging technologies and best practices for managing users' personalized environments when VDI is used for continuing operations.