Welcome!

Cloud Expo Authors: Maureen O'Gara, Derek Harris, Pat Romanski, Francois Lascelles, Elizabeth White

Related Topics: Cloud Expo, SOA & WOA, Virtualization, Security, GovIT

Cloud Expo: Article

CIA was Headed to an Enterprise Cloud All Along: Jill Tummler Singer

The Deputy CIO of the CIA gave unique insights into CIA's technology strategy on Tuesday in Washington, DC

Cloud Computing on Ulitzer

"I believe commercial solutions - whether its Google’s cloud or Amazon’s web services - may be perfect for many companies. But some corporations and government agencies are not going to be comfortable outsourcing their information and services to the Internet-based cloud," said Jill Tummler Singer, Deputy CIO of the Central Intelligence Agency, on Tuesday, at SYS-CON's 1st Annual GovIT Expo, in the event's opening keynote.

"For agencies like mine," Singer (pictured below) continued,  "and for many corporations, keeping such precious gems in our own possession is a foregone conclusion."


Jill Tummler Singer keynoting at 1st Annual GovIT Conference & Expo, Oct. 6

The answer, for the CIA at least, is what Singer calls Enterprise Cloud Computing.

Enterprise Cloud Computing as defined by Singer is behind the firewall and contained within a business enterprise (one company, one agency, or one supply chain, for example). 

"A true cloud environment contains many layers and extends beyond the compute platform," she noted.  "To gain early advantage in Enterprise Cloud Computing, you need at least a storage cloud and a compute/processing cloud sitting on top of your network cloud.  However, this requires each cloud user to bring database, application, web services, and security services with them.  You’ll achieve goodness in this scenario but you may not actually achieve faster, better, cheaper, and safer overall IT."

"If I look back at CIA’s technology strategy for the past few years, we were headed to an Enterprise Cloud all along, even if we didn’t call it that," Singer said. Virtualized servers were also a core strategy for CIA, she added.

"I suspect that most medium- and large-organizations have similar technology plans that also dovetail nicely into Enterprise Cloud Computing," said Singer, adding:

"Don’t think of the Cloud as a perpendicular technology approach aimed at derailing your current plans.  It isn’t.  Instead, think of the Cloud as an energy booster welded onto the side of your existing plans to get you to your goal state faster through commercial, commodity technologies and approaches.

Enterprise Cloud Computing allows you to cut the ball-and-chain of the past or release the albatross from around your neck. You’re no longer stuck with slow, lethargic, antiquated solutions.  Enterprise Cloud Computing allows your company to break away, soar, and be successful."

More Stories By Jeremy Geelan

Jeremy Geelan is President & COO of Cloud Expo, Inc. and Conference Chair of the worldwide Cloud Expo series. He appears regularly at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences both in North America and overseas. He is executive producer and presenter of Cloud Expo's "Power Panels" on SYS-CON.TV.

Comments (1) View Comments

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.


Most Recent Comments
4g wireless 09/29/09 02:24:00 PM EDT

Cloud computing is the new age of working together, any enterprise that serious about organizing should start using cloud computing...

Cloud Expo Breaking News
Why are APIs so important in clouds? Do APIs have to be open? How fast or slow will standardization in the cloud be? Why is ensuring high availability for the cloud service critical? In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Mårten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, will answer these questions and address cloud standards, APIs and the critical question: Will we end up with one, two or more competing cloud standards? And, how will this affect the evolution and adoption of cloud comput...
Very few trends in IT have generated as much buzz as cloud computing. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Mark Hinkle, Director, Cloud Computing Community at Citrix, will cut through the hype and quickly clarify the ontology for cloud computing. The bulk of the conversation will focus on the open source software that can be used to build compute clouds (infrastructure-as-a-service) and the complementary open source management tools that can be combined to automate the management...
The proliferation of device connectivity is redefining the functionality requirements and capabilities of many embedded systems as more and more of these devices look to leverage the “Cloud.” While many commercial software and hardware component vendors have begun to realign their value propositions to satisfy growing demand, commercial-off-the-shelf products (COTS) alone cannot meet every OEM’s needs. As a result, the Embedded Cloud has injected a new level of uncertainty and a new competitive ...
Hardware and chemistry improvements will make the $1,000 human genome a reality soon. While the massive amount of genomics data that will be generated represents a huge opportunity to advance personal medicine, it also presents an enormous big data challenge. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Dr Andreas Sundquist, CEO of DNAnexus, will discuss how the cloud will address these issues by enabling the management, storage, sharing and analysis of the world’s DNA data and how it ...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else h...
With Big Data Expo 2012 New York (co-located with 10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference...
In 2011, Apache Hadoop received tremendous attention for helping organizations cost-effectively capitalize on their big data. Hadoop is now disrupting the business of analyzing data. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Baldeschwieler, Co-Founder & CEO of Hortonworks, will look at the current state of the Hadoop project, lessons learned by deploying it at scale, and the roadmap for its future. Big Data Track attendees will learn about the exciting developments that have ...
The focus of Java EE 7 is on the cloud, and specifically it aims to bring Platform-as-a-Service providers and application developers together so that portable applications can be deployed on any cloud infrastructure and reap all its benefits in terms of scalability, elasticity, multitenancy, etc. The existing specifications in the platform such as JPA, Servlets, EJB, and others will be updated to meet these requirements. Java EE 7 continues the ease of development push that characterized prior ...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else h...
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else h...