GSA Archives

It's all cloud, all the time in federal IT these days, especially since the Office of Management and Budget ordered agencies to take a cloud-first approach to IT projects. Mary Davie, assistant commissioner for the Office of Integrated Technology Services in the General Services Administration's Federal Acquisition Service, provides a reality check on cloud mania today, with a blog post aimed at busting four myths about cloud computing in the federal sector.

Those myths, according to Davie, are:

• Cloud can be anything.
• Public clouds are not secure, and agencies can't control security requirements.
• Agencies will lose control of their data.
• Moving to the cloud is difficult.

The Homeland Security Department, GSA and Federal Protective Service said Wednesday the "see something, say something" campaign will be expanded to 9,000 federal buildings owned or leased by GSA nationwide.

In the coming weeks, public awareness materials for the campaign will be posted in buildings and signage will be posted at FPS guard stations at each facility. An existing national network of FPS call centers will answer any calls to the phone number posted on the sign, 877-4FPS-411, according to a DHS news release.

"Homeland security begins with hometown security and every citizen -- including government employees -- plays a critical role in ensuring America's safety and security," said DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano. "Our partnership with FPS and GSA to expand the 'If You See Something, Say Something' campaign to our nation's federal buildings is a crucial step in helping the millions of people who work in or visit our federal buildings every day identify and report suspicious activity indicators of terrorism, crime and other threats."

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority of New York City started the see something, say something campaign as a way for the public and employees to identify and report indicators of terrorism, crime and other threats. It was recently expanded to partners including Walmart, the Mall of America, Amtrak and the Metropolitan Washington Area Transit Authority.

GSA predicts its move to a cloud-based e-mail system for all employees will be a good thing in the long run, but the agency's chief information officer acknowledged some immediate challenges on Thursday.

Information security is the paramount concern with the switch to the system that will use the Google Apps for Government platform, said CIO Casey Coleman during a Thursday afternoon call with reporters.

Anytime a switch in a critical business platform occurs, other problems are bound to crop up as well, she said. Those include management challenges such as making sure everybody understands the process and the plan, as well as training issues.

Another problem that could pop up is ensuring that all information contained in the current platform is migrated successfully to the cloud, Coleman said.

Nevertheless, "I believe everyone is excited and looking forward to [the] change," Coleman added.

It was also critical that GSA make the switch now, according to Coleman. Current e-mail systems run on some servers that are as old as six years, and GSA has come close to an outage, Coleman said, adding there was an "urgency on [the] sense of timing." The agency plans to fully transition in fiscal year 2011.

Big news out of the General Services Administration today: It has become the first federal agency to move to a cloud-based e-mail system for all employees. The system will be on the Google Apps for Government platform. Agency officials say it will save $15 million over five years.

The move came in the form of a $6.7 million, five-year task order to Unisys Corp. under the Alliant Governmentwide Acquisition Contract. Unisys is partnering with Google, Tempus Nova, and Acumen Solutions.

We'll have more details on this soon.

The General Services Administration, which among other jobs manages federal buildings, is trying to eliminate the government's environmental footprint by doing things like facilitating green building projects and promoting telepresence.

But they want to do even more. Speaking Tuesday at the GOVgreen conference and expo in Washington, GSA's Commissioner of Public Buildings, Robert Peck, said the agency is still experimenting, trying to figure out what works and what doesn't.

"We've had some issues," he said, such as when GSA would see a return on its investment in green technology. He said the agency would like to see a return in 10-15 years, unlike private companies, which typically want ROI within five to six years.

But cultural issues are even bigger hurdles, Peck said. The agency's overseers on Capitol Hill and members of the news media are constantly launching efforts "aimed at making sure we don't make mistakes." The fact that what agency officials do could land them in front of a congressional hearing sometimes causes them to hold back.

What's the solution? To "get America to embrace that we can make mistakes," Peck said.

An employee at the General Services Administration accidentally sent the names and Social Security numbers of the agency's staff to a private e-mail address, The New York Times reported on Saturday. GSA, which employs more than 12,000 people, is going to pay for one-year of credit monitoring and up to $25,000 in identify threat insurance coverage, according to the news report.

The breach occurred when a worker apparently accidentally transmitted the file containing the personal data while seeking "work-related assistance." The computer that received the data was scrubbed clean by GSA technicians.

The Times reports there is a discrepancy between when employees were notified and the breach. Although the breach occurred in late September, GSA employees told the Times they did not learn of the breach until early November, putting them "at greater risk."

The inspector general is investigating he incident.

The General Services Administration has contracted with AT&T to develop and manage telepresence centers at 11 federal buildings across the country, enabling agencies to hold virtual meetings.

The centers, scheduled to be operational early next year, are designed to help agencies cut down on travel costs by facilitating face to face meetings online. They will be built at each of GSA's 11 regional headquarters offices, which are located in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago, Kansas City, Fort Worth, Denver, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. Four other Washington-area buildings also will get centers.

AT&T will develop and oversee the network of centers via an $18 million task order under GSA's Networx contract.

Here's the full announcement from GSA:

Oct. 25, 2010

GSA Moves to Establish Telepresence Centers for Government Use

Virtual meetings help federal agencies meet sustainability and cost-cutting goals.

WASHINGTON - In a significant step toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions and saving federal travel dollars, the U.S. General Services Administration announced today it will establish virtual meeting centers at federal buildings across the United States. When operational in early 2011, the centers will be available for use by all federal agencies at a fixed hourly rate, making it easy for federal employees to conduct important face-to-face meetings without the need to travel. The centers will also be made available to stateside military families so that they can meet virtually with service members overseas.

"As the federal government's workplace solutions expert, GSA is exploring new ways to create a more efficient, cost-effective, and sustainable government for the American people," said GSA Administrator Martha N. Johnson. "This includes incorporating innovative and collaborative technologies like virtual meeting centers to create seamless connections around the world. Availability of virtual meeting technology will help launch our government to the next level of productivity."

The centers will be built at each of GSA's 11 regional headquarters offices in federal buildings in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago, Kansas City, Fort Worth, Denver, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., as well as four headquarters locations in the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area. The centers will be specially constructed and equipped to provide live, face-to-face, immersive meeting experiences to all participants across the network. Each room will contain high-definition video and advanced audio equipment, as well as state of the art collaboration tools to enhance the immersive experience and facilitate participant productivity. The network will allow any subscribing agency to meet with counterparts in any of these cities as well as with counterparts in other telepresence-type networks nationally and internationally.

AT&T will develop and manage the virtual network through an estimated $18 million task order under GSA's Networx Enterprise contract. The contractor's infrastructure costs will be rolled into a set hourly rate that is then purchased by GSA and customer agencies in a "pay as you go" model, avoiding the need for individual agency start up costs. Once the network is operational, agencies will be able to order and schedule virtual meeting sessions through a secure web-based portal as well as through a valet that will be available around the clock.

What the ongoing furor over the Wikileaks phenomenon has revealed, writes Peter Ludlow, author of Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias, "is that the media and government agencies believe there is a single protagonist to be concerned with -- something of a James Bond villain, if you will."

The affinity to put all responsibility on a point person -- whether it is Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, or whistleblowers like Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning -- is a natural reaction within the federal government, whose own movement towards transparency has proved a top-down directive. But while the General Service Administration, under the orders of the White House, has had to deal with the task of powering the "Open Government Directive,"

Wikileaks is not the one-off creation of a solitary genius; it is the product of decades of collaborative work by people engaged in applying computer hacking to political causes, in particular, to the principle that information-hoarding is evil -- and, as Stewart Brand said in 1984, "Information wants to be free."

While agencies have had to be instructed, audited and for some, shamed into compliance, there is no central protagonist behind the Wikileaks, "an informal network of revolutionary individuals bound by a shared ethic and culture," argues Ludlow.

It's widely rumored that if Assange were to be detained or decimated -- a threat that is becoming more real after he was suspected of rape -- a password to all of the whistleblower website's encrypted files would be released to the public. On the other hand, if the administration changed hands, there's a very real chance that the open government movement might lose momentum.

The movement may have engaged advocates, developers, academics, companies, but it's not met its grandiose vision of empowering the public. USAspending.gov, after three redesigns, is "pretty impressive looking, but its data is almost completely useless," Ellen Miller, Sunlight Foundation's co-founder said at Gov 2.0 Summit. If open government continues to take place within a blackbox, Wikileaks will have to increasingly take on the mantle of disclosure and transparency.

The Health and Human Services Department awarded Verizon Business, a Verizon Communications unit, a $169 million contract to manage and secure Internet protocol and data networks.

The award, announced on Tuesday, was made off the General Services Administration's Networx Universal contract and will include security capabilities for HHS including processing Medicare claims, according to a Verizon press release.

Agencies have been slow to transition to the new telecommunications services since GSA awarded Networx in March 2007, Nextgov reported.

The Sunlight Foundation said on Tuesday that it launched Clearspending.com, a site that will analyze data from USAspending.gov.

In a presentation at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, the Sunlight Foundation's co-founder Ellen Miller said you "can't trust any of the aggregate information you get from [USASpending.gov] . . . . The government says its working on fixing it but all we get are redesigned websites."

Miller said that for fiscal 2009 alone, Sunlight found more than $1.3 trillion in broken reporting.