The folks from BMC and Dell reached out to me a while back to introduce me to something they were working on, a set of products and services designed to help the U.S. Government achieve its plans to reorganize its IT operations to both reduce overall cost and the improve levels of responsiveness. BMC is offering a set of tools called BMC Remedy OnDemand for the public sector.
Moving into the cloud
This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone since the U.S. Federal Government has been working hard to improve the operational efficiency of its massive IT infrastructure. The Federal CIO, has published a document, “25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal IT Management” that defines the way forward. It has a strong focus on the following items:
- Centralization and consolidation initiatives – a minimum of 800 data centers will be closed by 2015
- Cloud first – default to cloud-based solutions whenever a secure, reliable, cost-effective cloud option exists
- IT strategic plans for “light technology” – the adoption and use of cloud services, such as SaaS, which can be deployed rapidly & shared
What are BMC and Dell doing?
BMC and Dell are working together to offer the U.S. Government a combination of BMC’s Remedy OnDemand and Dell’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering. The partners are working to get provisional US FedRAMP approval for their combined Software as a Service (SaaS) IT Service Management (ITSM) offering when US FedRAMP is operational later on this year.
Their goal is making a reliable, manageable, secure, tested cloud computing environment available to Federal, State and Local government entities.
Snapshot Analysis
Making a ITSM product comply with the requirements in the The Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002 (FISMA) is no simple task. This legislation sets up a framework of defining what data should be protected, how it should be protected, how to test if it is being protected properly, authorize the system(s) to process this data and then how to monitor the ongoing operations of the system(s).
I found it very impressive that BMC and Dell are offering products and services designed to address the low and intermediate FISMA controls for both infrastructure and applications.
I expect that IT departments in Federal, State and Local governments will find this combination useful.
