August 2008 • Volume 6 • Number 8
It's About the Platform, the Hosted Environment and the Cloud!
 “We need to be able to deploy a Warfighting force wherever in the world and enable it to connect, share and collaborate as it sees fit for its mission, not for something that is prescribed for them,” explained DISA CIO John Garing.
“It’s all about the platform and the cloud and the hosted work environment. We need to provide the hosted environment, the cloud (computing environment), so people can work from wherever they are.”
The “we” Mr. Garing was describing is DISA and it demonstrates how integral the DISA infrastructure is to the on-the-ground success of our Warfighters. He made those comments during the Federal Executive Forum panel on Future Infrastructure broadcast on Federal News Radio.
Hosted by Jim Flyzik, joining Mr. Garing on the panel were:
· John Johnson, Assistant Commissioner, ITS, GSA
· Tom Simmons, Area Vice President, Citrix Systems
· Gary DePreta, Manager, Channel Operations, Cisco Systems
· Edward Vaccaro Partner, Homeland Security, Federal Systems - Unisys
Networx Trigger
 When you think about the future of government infrastructure, two major players come immediately to mind – GSA and DISA. Right now GSA is ramping up its Networx contract for telecommunications services that agencies must use by 2010 as the replacement for the expiring FTS 2001. GSA Assistant ITS Commissioner John Johnson said that GSA is making steady progress. Read More Watch Video
The DISA Perspective
 The bottom line according to DISA CIO John Garing is with a large infrastructure to manage,they are constantly making decisions on what to buy versus what to acquire with a service.
And when it comes to competing infrastructure Garing said that DISA has been doing managed services of sorts since 2001 and now we have the processing and storage capacity on on-demand contracts. “The premise was to become faster in our ability to deliver capability to our customers.”
Garing said DISA looks at infrastructure from 4 perspectives. Read More Watch Video
Wanted: Managed Services
Can an agency afford to own its entire infrastructure anymore? There are times when it makes business and financial sense to let an expert manage portions of your infrastructure – especially your network infrastructure. Read More Watch Video
Infrastructure Challenges
The vision is not as easy as technology said John Garing who also urged changes to the way we buy things and the way we operate. “Right now we buy agency by agency; within DOD it is service by service, command by command. There is an ownership issue. And then you do you define enterprise. Is it a base? A command? The whole DOD? Read More Watch Video
Infrastructure’s New Tools
“We can’t control it and we have to focus the energy and the power of Web 2.0. We have to find a way to bring this stuff into the environment; to equip the young people who are being recruited to work in the military with tools they are used to having at home. It’s hard because the acquisition process, though it has flexibility, it is very stodgy,” said DISA CIO John Garing. Read More Watch Video
Infrastructure Visions
 For Unisys' Ed Ed Vaccaro, the vision starts with getting people access to information anytime anywhere with the understanding that technology is going to introduce all kind of different ways to work with information. Read More Watch Video
 For Citrix's Tom Simmons at Citrix, the vision is about a model. “The analogy we use is: the consolidation of data centers is following a delivery model. If you look at Direct TV as a means of consolidating content, consolidating capabilities and then delivering that over available infrastructure, they use satellite.” Read More Watch Video
 For Cisco's Gary DePreto of Cisco, the vision is a real transformation for the citizen and the IT end user experience. “I keep coming back to anytime, anywhere anyplace, seeing those services delivered in automated fashion where end user needs very little interaction to get something out of the service. The end user experience becomes very simple. Read More Watch Video
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