HP expands its cloud for government
Connecting state and local government leaders
HP Enterprise Cloud Services-Compute for U.S. Public Sector is designed to help agencies implement "cloud-first" strategies while providing economic, security and reliability benefits, HP officials said.
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Services has expanded its cloud offering to conform to the requirements of federal, state and local government, allowing agencies to quickly deploy new services.
HP Enterprise Cloud Services-Compute for U.S. Public Sector is designed to help agencies implement “cloud-first” strategies while providing economic, security and reliability benefits, HP officials said.
As part of the Office of Management and Budget’s 25-Point Reform Plan for IT, the cloud-first policy requires federal agencies to evaluate safe, secure cloud computing options before making any new investments.
HP ECS-Compute offers agencies cloud infrastructure as a service in which users can provision servers from HP, eliminating the time spent ordering, installing and imaging application servers to bring them online. When servers are no longer required, the client releases them back to HP, reducing the cost of IT infrastructure resources and shifting resources from operations to innovation.
Agencies will have on-demand network access to a pool of computing resources with minimal management or provider interaction, HP officials said.
The service was designed specifically to meet moderate baseline security and privacy controls for the Federal Information Security Management Act and Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program. Data is hosted within the continental U.S. in a certified HP data center, HP officials said.
Additionally, HP services such as the HP Enterprise Cloud Services Portal allow agencies to manage the cloud environment by providing full operational visibility into performance, availability and configurations through a secured Web-based interface.
“CIOs struggle with legacy IT systems and processes that are slow to respond when agencies need to cost-effectively innovate and quickly respond to dynamic market pressures,” said Marilyn Crouther, senior vice president and general manager for the U.S. Public Sector at HP Enterprise Services. ECS-Compute will allow agencies to reduce operating costs and align IT capacity to meet timely mission demands, Crouther said.