Carpathia and Digital Realty Trust are the latest entrants into the customized cloud services market for government. The two companies are coming together to offer a merged feature set of their services for clients in need of a custom cloud environment. Being relatively new, the San Francisco-based group will offer global data center services, primarily aimed at the public facing cloud environment.
Carpathia’s capabilities include comprehensive services for network, security, server, storage and back-up, complete with adherence to security and compliance standards. Additional features that are part of the Digital Realty Trust partnership include modular colocation designs that allow for scalability from a single rack to a private cage or a fully dedicated data center suite; expert data center strategy guidance; and cloud services and managed hosting that meet the most stringent security and compliance standards. This includes private, community, hybrid and public clouds.
The partnership, which is aimed in part at government clients is notable considering the existing competition for the ‘G-Cloud’ market. CivSource has previously reported on FedRAMP compliant efforts from the usual suspects including Verizon, IBM and Amazon Web Services. Late last week, Red Hat for Government and VMware also announced their own security compliant government-specific cloud offerings.
Despite the constant narrative that government security and IT offices are facing adoption challenges when it comes to cloud services,a report released by IDC Government Insights concludes cloud spending in fiscal 2014 will exceed earlier predictions, climbing above $3 billion. The U.S. Office of Management and Budget had allocated just over $2.2 billion for federal cloud deployment during the current fiscal year that ends Sept. 30.
The Feds have also released a plan to create a government-wide cloud services panel. Procurement officials will select the panel by December and start executing on agreements. Ultimately, the creation of the panel will result in a catalog of government approved cloud services providers and capabilities – which is likely why we’re seeing the land rush now, in terms of staking out some part of that market. Once decided, the cloud services panel will run through the second quarter of 2017, and will also include a subset focused on specialist cloud services.
