Verizon Poised to Assist U.S. Department of Agriculture Accelerate Cloud Computing Initiatives

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From its "Cloud First" strategy and 25 Point Federal IT Reform Implementation Plan to the mandate to consolidate federal data centers, it is clear that the U.S. federal government is serious about changing the way it procures and manages IT resources.

To accelerate its cloud-computing initiatives and boost efforts to broadly adopt cloud services across its multiple agencies, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently awarded the department’s Enterprise Data Center cloud blanket purchase agreement to Verizon under the company’s GSA Schedule 70 program.

This flexible agreement, under which Verizon will offer its Enterprise Cloud: Federal Edition infrastructure-as-a-service offering to 34 USDA agencies and offices, is administered by the USDA’s National Information Technology Center, a centralized data center management operation responsible for the availability and security of information utilized by the department’s more than 100,000 employees to provide vital services. The USDA and its employees are responsible for the development and execution of federal government policy on farming, agriculture, forestry and food, as well as agriculture trade promotion, food safety programs, natural resource protection, hunger-abatement programs and rural community support.

Given the scope and breadth of the USDA’s mission coupled with tight budgets and IT executives seeking to enhance service levels with fewer personnel and budget resources, cloud computing is well suited to help the department face its resource challenges and meet mission-critical objectives and federal mandates.

“My cloud-computing conversations with federal IT leaders have definitely changed over the past couple of years,” said Susan Zeleniak, senior vice president – public sector markets, Verizon Enterprise Solutions. “It’s no longer a question if cloud initiatives will be successful but how can they determine the best applications to move to the cloud and quicken the pace of cloud migrations and data center consolidation programs.”

Enterprise Cloud: Federal Edition, the service available under the USDA’s blanket purchase agreement, addresses the stringent security and reliability requirements of federal agencies. It is designed to meet the risk management framework outlined in NIST 800-53, a set of recommended security controls for federal information systems. The Verizon public cloud-computing environment is also designed to achieve the highest security certification under FedRAMP, a governmentwide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services.

In addition, the Verizon-Terremark purpose-built Tier III federal data centers in Culpeper, Va., and Miami feature multiple layers of redundancy – facility, power, HVAC – and meet or exceed FISMA High criteria for physical and environmental controls. The hardened data center facilities are under continuous physical and virtual surveillance, and are protected by round-the-clock armed guards.

Verizon provides enterprise-grade cloud-computing solutions to approximately 75 federal agencies. These represent large-scale, production deployments with Verizon’s cloud-computing platform providing the high availability, reliability and security required by federal agencies.

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