Andrea DiMaio

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is one of the government organizations in the US that can be or aims to become a private cloud service provider. Their Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE) was launched a few months ago to allow on-demand access to infrastructure to develop and test new custom applications.

Now RACE is available also as an operational environment, according to what Henry Sienkiewicz, technical program director for DISA computing services, said at press briefing, as reported by NextGov.. The service will be first available available on unclassified defense networks, but is expected to be extended to its secret network soon.

This is an interesting example of how some federal agencies are positioning themselves as providers of private or community cloud services. As I said in a previous post, it will be interesting to watch what their role will be in the evolution of OMB-GSA strategy on cloud computing (whose first step has been Apps.gov) and whether they will find themselves competing with vendors who move into the private cloud business.

Henry Sienkiewicz will join our panel on The Government and Cloud Computing to be held on 18 October on the first day of Gartner Symposium in Orlando, immediately before Vivek Kundra’s interview. The panel will be moderated by my colleague Jeff Vining and other panelists will be Casey Coleman (CIO at GSA), Chris Kemp  (CIO at NASA Ames Research Center), June Hartley (Associate IT Director at NBC), and Gopal Khanna (President NASCIO and CIO Minnesota).