CSC unveils a cloud for federal agencies

Federal agencies looking to move IT services to the cloud have yet another option.

CSC has unveiled a cloud computing platform designed primarily for federal agencies, which provides infrastructure-as-a-service offerings.

Built using National Institute of Standards and Technology guidelines, the CSC CloudCompute for Government will offer other cloud services in the future. The multitenant community cloud can respond rapidly to changing requirements at a fraction of the cost of a private cloud or a traditional data center, CSC officials said.

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CloudCompute for Government offers a pay-as-you-go pricing structure, which aligns with the emerging buying alternative to only pay for services utilized.

The cloud computing platform can handle a variety of government applications and services, and allows agencies to shorten time to production, said James Sheaffer, president of CSC’s North American Public Sector.

The platform is geared for agencies with information systems processing data at the Federal Information Security Management Act's moderate and low system classification levels. CSC enhances security with the company’s own holistic defense-in-depth security framework. The framework comprises physical and logical security, virtual machines, access control and data integrity capabilities required to support mission-critical applications, CSC officials said.

CSC’s CloudCompute for Government data centers and IT service management centers are located within the continental United States and are geographically dispersed, which provides redundancy and disaster-recovery capabilities. Support staff are U.S. citizens with the appropriate federal agency personnel clearance levels, officials said.

CloudCompute for Government is built on a multitenancy architecture that combines VCE’s Vblock, an integrated cloud fabric, with CSC’s managed services and cybersecurity expertise. VCE is a company formed by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware and Intel. As a result, Vblock combines virtualization software from VMware; unified networking, security and computing from Cisco; and storage security and management technologies from EMC.

CSC joins a growing list of companies providing government-specific cloud infrastructure, including Amazon, Google, Harris Corp., IBM, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, RightNow Technologies (acquired by Oracle in 2011), and Terremark, a Verizon company.