Not surprisingly, Washington, D.C. was listed as one of the five cities where hiring demand for positions with cloud skills was highest. Others included Seattle, San Francisco, New York and San Jose, which topped the list.

“As companies shift IT investments to cloud-based applications, demand for these skills should continue and recruiting conditions will be moderately difficult across the U.S.,” according to a PRWeb release.

There are, on average, 10 candidates for each cloud computing job in the U.S., according to WANTED Analytics.

“It is likely that employers and staffing firms will compete heavily to source qualified candidates,” according to the release. “However, each location will experience varying degrees of difficulty. For example, Seattle’s talent pool is smaller than average, with just eight potential candidates per advertised job in July. In comparison, the talent pool in New York consists of 16 candidates per job, larger than the national average.”

Some of the jobs that listed a need for cloud computing skills: computer programmers, IT specialists, computer software engineers, computer system engineers, and web developers.

72 percent of the IT professionals surveyed said they plan to increase their use of the cloud over the next year. Of those, 64 percent said they plan to spend at least five percent more on cloud in that same time period.

The survey was conducted by CompTIA, a non-profit IT trade association.

Some of the major reasons given for companies’ decisions to use the cloud:

• 49 percent said it’s to cut capital expenditure costs on hardware and other systems,
• 44 percent said it’s to cut costs overall,
• 33 percent said it’s to add new features and capabilities they can’t get with other models.

The study also found medium-sized companies (revenues from $10 million to $99.9 million annually) are the ones using cloud the most. 64 percent of them have adopted cloud computing. 58 percent of large companies (revenues greater that $100 million) are using the cloud. Small-sized companies reported using cloud computing the least. Only 36 percent of them have jumped into the cloud.

Perceptions on cloud computing are also getting more positive. 72 percent of those surveyed said they felt more positive about the cloud this year than they did last year. 25 percent said their opinion on the cloud hasn’t changed, according to TMCnet.

542 “IT end-user customers, influencers, and solution providers” were surveyed by CompTIA from June 29 – July 13. The study is called, “Cloud Computing: Pulling Back the Curtain.”

“We’re going to be moving in many cases toward a private cloud construct, but we’re thinking about the possibilities for commercial cloud,” Takai told an audience at the annual Defense Information Systems Agency conference, according to Information Week. “One of the things my office is working on is, as we move toward commercial cloud, what does that mean and what do we need from a DoD perspective.”

Takai didn’t give any more details on the actual release of the policy.

Takai also discussed the Army’s new enterprise email system and what it means for other branches of the military. The Army’s system is built in the Defense Information Systems Agency’s private cloud. She said she would like to see others use it if they see value in it.

“Remember that enterprise email doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody goes to DISA. We have to get to a common identity management structure, we have to get to a common directory structure, we have to be able to collaborate. That’s really the infrastructure that’s critical here. We’re working with the Navy right now to say, ‘What does that look like for Navy?’ My preference is to work through the technical details to get to our end objective, because when you do that, you don’t have to dictate. Otherwise, if I dictated something, I’m going to be the bad guy every time somebody’s BlackBerry doesn’t work. That doesn’t get you to the end objective.”

Two firms protest GSA’s email cloud RFP

The General Services Administration’s $2.5 billion email-as-a-service contract is under protest. The two vendors filing the pre-solicitation protests said GSA’s requirement to have a government-only cloud is a “restrictive specification” and therefore not allowed under federal acquisition rules. Federal News Radio’s Jason Miller reports GSA is continuing to evaluate offers while it waits for a decision by the Government Accountability Office, which is expected by Oct. 17.

Army cloud email a ‘pathfinder’ to enterprise services

After being on hold for the past month, the Army on Tuesday resumed the migration of its 1.4 million email users around the world to the cloud. Federal News Radio’s Jared Serbu reports, Army leaders are now aiming to have the entire migration completed by March of next year. The Army sees this as its starting point for greater use of the cloud. Once the email migration is complete, Mike Krieger, the Army’s deputy chief information officer, said his agency plans a new wave of enterprise services enabled by a more unified network, including collaboration tools in the cloud.

In addition to the security breaches, customers’ worries about where across the globe their data is being housed also play a role. Read Write Web says there is a “trend among cloud customers to request that their data only be housed in jurisdictions where law enforcement agencies would not be entitled to seek court-warranted access to them.”

But, Gartner Research Director Carsten Casper says instead of demanding your data be stored in a specific country, companies should tell their vendors where they don’t want their data stored.

“Don’t demand storage in a specific country for privacy purposes alone,” Casper was quoted on Read Write Web. “There are other cases when sensitive company information should not leave the country (for example, if there are export control or national security concerns), but in most cases – and usually under conditions – in-country storage is not mandatory for privacy compliance. In some cases, it will be sufficient to ensure that personal data will not be stored in a specific country that is known for its privacy violations.”

Gartner says, cloud computing is one of six areas that will be at the top of privacy officers’ agendas for the remainder of 2011 and 2012, in addition to data breaches, location-based services, offshoring, context-awareness and regulatory changes.

According to Federal News Radio reporter Jared Serbu, the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command is contemplating “a public-private data center model to consolidate the dozens of facilities operated by the Navy and Marine Corps into a more rational footprint, as well as a commercial solution to cloud-based email and collaboration.”

It wants to explore software-as-a-service offerings that include email, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and groupware, as well as audio and video chat, instant messaging, and calendaring.

Interested parties are asked to respond to the announcement by Aug. 29.

VanRoekel will be taking over where Vivek Kundra leaves off – leading an IT community that has been charged with helping the government save money via data center consolidation and using newer, innovative technologies like cloud computing. Under his leadership, the FCC was the first agency to take its full web presence to a FISMA-compliant cloud.

“What I really saw at the Federal Communications Commission is that this notion of re-imagining government in the context of the pace of innovation of private industry can be done in government,” VanRoekel said at a White House press briefing this week. “And it can be done in such a way that can save money, save resources and everything else. We were in lock step with Vivek’s team here on data center consolidation, our cloud-first policy and using tools like TechStat and all of that, even though we were an independent agency we were doing everything to close that productivity gap and make things better. I saw what could be done. Now I’m really excited about the ability to take that work and scale it to the broader notion of government and take the momentum and impact things broadly.”

VanRoekel will have one week on the job with Kundra before Kundra leaves for a fellowship at Harvard University, but it’s clear the work Kundra started will be expanded upon under the new CIO.

“Vivek’s work was really the first step in a larger rework of government IT,” VanRoekel said. “It lays an amazing foundation on which we can build a new set of phenomenon. Looking at things like more in the open government space, looking at shared services across agencies, looking at procurement, purchase and IT investment models are something I really want to explore. This is all very early thinking, of course. These are all things I’ve struggled with at the FCC, that we found creative ways to work in the context of government, and I’m excited that can actually scale pretty broadly.”

“In facing both an expected decrease in resources and the impending end of life for major elements of its existing infrastructure, GAO is looking for avenues to not merely maintain the existing environment but to take steps to transform it into an environment that is more cost-effective, sustainable and aligned with future business needs,” GAO wrote in the RFI.

GAO noted its multiple locations around the country, its massive amounts of data, and security as three of the main things vendors should consider when submitting their responses to the agency.

Interested companies have until 4:30 p.m. on Aug. 26 to reply to the RFI.

GAO is the latest in a long list of agencies interested in cloud computing. The government’s 25-point IT reform plan released in December called on agencies to identify three current systems to move to the cloud. The plan also called for agencies to follow a cloud-first policy when evaluating options for new IT systems.

Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra has said he believes $20 billion of the $80 billion government spends on IT is a potential for migration to the cloud.

“A lot of people are sort of driving this notion of fear around security,” Kundra said, according to Computer World. “And the reason I think that’s been amplified, frankly, is because it preserves the status quo.”

The conference was organized by Kundra and Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) to address the future of cloud computing in the federal government.

While security remains a major concern and, in some cases, a roadblock to public cloud adoption, agencies like the Department of Homeland Security are bucking the trend. DHS announced in May plans to move its public websites to the public cloud.

“I am a believer that we are going to, over the next few years, really solve a lot of the cybersecurity concerns that we have with cloud-based services,” DHS CIO Richard Spires said at the forum, according to Computer World.

Kundra also believes the shift to cloud computing will mean stiffer competition among government contractors. According to Federal Times, “Kundra said the administration wants to ‘introduce Darwinian pressure’ into the market to ensure that companies win government IT contracts because they provide greater efficiencies, not because they’ve mastered the procurement process.”

Saving money has been a major topic of conversation on Capitol Hill in recent weeks as lawmakers sparred over raising the debt ceiling.

During the forum, Sen. Carper said the use of cloud computing and smarter IT overall is one of the biggest ways to save money in government.

“We need to look into every nook and cranny of the federal government and find better results for less money . . . One of the great ways you can provide better service for less money is to do IT well and to do it smart,” Carper said, according to NextGov.

Industry leaders are calling on the federal government to revise its acquisition and budgeting practices, in hopes of accelerating the adoption of cloud services. The CLOUD² commission made recommendations to government earlier this week.

“Agencies should demonstrate flexibility in adapting current procurement models and existing contracts to take advantage of new cloud offerings,” according to the group.

Federal News Radio’s Ruben Gomez reports the CLOUD² report was requested by Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra.

The commission also recommended industry launch new transparency efforts to publicize information about operational aspects of cloud services, including portability, performance and reliability.

In other cloud news, the General Services Administration became the first agency to migrate its entire staff into a cloud email system. All 17,000 of its users are officially in the cloud as of this week.

“In GSA, we have a motto that we have broad shoulders,” said Dave McClure, GSA’s associate administrator for citizen services and innovative technologies. “We need to be actually doing what we’re recommending other agencies do.”

Federal News Radio’s Jared Serbu reports 15 other agencies have identified almost one million federal email accounts they want to move to the cloud.