Nextgov

Cloud provider Terremark is signing on with the Federal Communications Commission for another $300,000 to help accommodate a 55 percent spike in traffic to the agency’s website after its 2010 “open government” revamp, contract documents show.

Verizon-owned Terremark was brought on board as a cloud “infrastructure-as-a-service” provider in 2010 when the FCC added new features on its website after the Obama administration challenged agencies to offer more interactive and accessible websites as part of a transparency initiative.

Federal cloud computing generally involves moving government applications from local networks to remote ones operated by contractors that deliver the applications over the Internet. The 55 percent growth in FCC Web traffic raised concerns about “cloudbursting,” industry jargon for the failure of a cloud-computing environment to handle increased demands.

The FCC modified the contract terms to accommodate the greater traffic. The new contract included extra security components to ensure the system was compliant with Federal Information Security Management Act standards.

The FCC currently owes approximately $450,000 for services rendered by Terremark for the 12-month period ending September 2012; the additional services would raise procurement costs to about $750,000.

In 2011, Vivek Kundra, then federal chief information officer, said in his roadmap for the federal cloud computing that an estimated $20 billion -- one quarter of the government’s fiscal 2012 IT budget -- was expected to be used for migration to cloud services. Kundra joined cloud company Salesforce.com as executive vice president of emerging markets in January.

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