Daily Archives: June 23, 2017

This brown dwarf used to be inside its white dwarf companion. – Astronomy Magazine

Posted: June 23, 2017 at 6:49 am

About 2,700 light years away from Earth, an incredibly rare event is occurring: a white dwarf and brown dwarf are closely orbiting each other in less than an hour and a half.

The white dwarf, which scientists are calling WD 1202-024, was discovered in 2006. WD 1202 became a white dwarf about 50 million years ago when it ran out of usable hydrogen in its core. When a study showed WD 1202 having a consistent change in brightness, astronomers assumed the white dwarf was a variable star. While studying what caused the change in brightness, astronomers were surprised to find that its actually caused by a companion brown dwarf.

The pair is only separated by about 192,625 miles (310,000 kilometers), which is closer than the Moon is to Earth. The white dwarfs gravity is so strong and so fast 62 miles (100 kilometers) per second that it pulls the brown dwarf into an orbit that is completed every 71 minutes.

The brown dwarf, like all brown dwarfs, is too big to be considered a planet, but not big enough to sustain nuclear fusion. This brown dwarf is 67 times the mass of Jupiter and about the equivalent diameter. Because white dwarfs are small husks of former stars, its also wider (though not as massive) as its home dead star. Since its so much bigger than the white dwarf it blocks the light from us when it passes by it.

WD 1202 burns at a scorching 40,352 Fahrenheit (22,000 Celsius), making it bright enough to see, while the brown dwarf is too faint to be seen without the help of its white dwarf companion.

Astronomers believe the brown dwarf was inside WD1202 about 50 million years ago when WD 1202 expanded to become a red giant, becoming bigger than the brown dwarfs orbital distance and engulfing the entire brown dwarf. But the brown dwarf survived when the density of the gas in the red giants outer layers dropped while it expanded, saving the brown dwarf from becoming so hot that it shrunk its orbit.

The brown dwarf is orbiting so closely to WD 1202 that its slowly getting drawn into its host star. Astronomers believe in about 250 million years the brown dwarf will get so close that the white dwarfs gravity will draw material from the brown dwarf and eventually end up a type 1a supernova when theres enough material mixed with intense gravity and the white dwarf will go through sudden catastrophic fusion and explode with a flare in brightness over the system, before cooling and dimming again, to repeat all over again in years to come.

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Is there another Planet Nine altogether? – Astronomy Magazine

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Planet Nine, meet also Planet Nine. Maybe.

An Earth or Mars-sized world or even two may exist on the outskirts of the Kuiper Belt at an eight degree inclined orbit, shifting a number of Kuiper Belt orbits up to a similar inclination.

The planet-mass object would be about 60 AU from the Sun. One AU is the distance between the Sun and Earth, with Pluto at about 30 AU at closest approach.

The proposed planet, hypothesized by Kat Volk and Renu Malhotra of the University of Arizona, is different than the one proposed by Caltechs Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin. Brown and Batygin propose a much more distant ice giant a bit smaller than Neptune, whereas Volk and Malhortas planet is smaller and much closer in.

In fact, one does not preclude the existence of the other as the dwarf planets affected by Planet Nines orbit far, far away.

If it clears its orbit to meet the definition of a planet (and actually exists) we could probably consider it Planet Nine and rename Planet Nine to Planet Ten. Or if youre a Pluto Truther, consider it Planet Ten, Eris as Planet Eleven (same size as Pluto so you have to count it), and Planet Nine as Planet Twelve.

Regardless, we could have a long lost sister to Earth and Mars lurking surprisingly close, in overall solar system terms.

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Jerry Nelson, astronomer who built advanced telescopes, dies – Paradise Post

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SANTA CRUZ, Calif. (AP) Jerry Nelson, an astronomer who designed advanced telescopes that help scientists glimpse far reaches of the universe, has died in California. He was 73.

The University of California, Santa Cruz, where Nelson was a professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics, said he died June 10 at his home. No cause was given.

Nelson's design using dozens of segmented mirrors rather than a single large one was the basis for the Keck Observatory's twin 10-meter telescopes on Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano in Hawaii. Those telescopes, among the largest in use, have allowed scientists to measure the black hole at the center of the Milky Way and to spot planetary bodies outside our solar system.

"Jerry's impacts on the field of astronomy and astrophysics are legendary, and we will all benefit from his legacy for many years to come," said Claire Max, director of UC Observatories.

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Nelson's concept has since been used for other large ground-based telescopes around the world. The space-based James Webb telescope, which is under construction, also has a segmented primary mirror design.

Nelson also played an important role in the development of adaptive optics technology, which sharpens the images from ground-based telescopes by correcting for the blurring effect of Earth's atmosphere, the university said.

Even after a stroke in 2011 that left him partly disabled, Nelson continued work for the Thirty Meter Telescope, a project to build the largest telescope in the Northern Hemisphere.

"His endless curiosity always pushed the scientists around him to think more deeply, and his persistence and continued excellence after his stroke were inspirational to everyone," said Michael Bolte, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz.

Born near Los Angeles, Nelson earned an undergraduate degree from the California Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in physics at UC Berkeley, where he taught for years before moving to Santa Cruz. He also worked for more than a decade at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Nelson is survived by his wife, sister, two children from his first marriage and three grandchildren. His first wife died in 1992.

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Jerry Nelson, astronomer who built advanced telescopes, dies … – ABC News

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Jerry Nelson, an astronomer who designed advanced telescopes that help scientists glimpse far reaches of the universe, has died in California. He was 73.

The University of California, Santa Cruz, where Nelson was a professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics, said he died June 10 at his home. No cause was given.

Nelson's design using dozens of segmented mirrors rather than a single large one was the basis for the Keck Observatory's twin 10-meter telescopes on Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano in Hawaii. Those telescopes, among the largest in use, have allowed scientists to measure the black hole at the center of the Milky Way and to spot planetary bodies outside our solar system.

"Jerry's impacts on the field of astronomy and astrophysics are legendary, and we will all benefit from his legacy for many years to come," said Claire Max, director of UC Observatories.

Nelson's concept has since been used for other large ground-based telescopes around the world. The space-based James Webb telescope, which is under construction, also has a segmented primary mirror design.

Nelson also played an important role in the development of adaptive optics technology, which sharpens the images from ground-based telescopes by correcting for the blurring effect of Earth's atmosphere, the university said.

Even after a stroke in 2011 that left him partly disabled, Nelson continued work for the Thirty Meter Telescope, a project to build the largest telescope in the Northern Hemisphere.

"His endless curiosity always pushed the scientists around him to think more deeply, and his persistence and continued excellence after his stroke were inspirational to everyone," said Michael Bolte, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz.

Born near Los Angeles, Nelson earned an undergraduate degree from the California Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in physics at UC Berkeley, where he taught for years before moving to Santa Cruz. He also worked for more than a decade at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Nelson is survived by his wife, sister, two children from his first marriage and three grandchildren. His first wife died in 1992.

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South Bay astronomer wins $500000 prize – Milpitas Post

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In astronomy circles, Monte Sereno resident Sandra Faber is a big deal; She was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Barack Obama in 2013 and last monthin recognition of her lifes workit was announced that Faber is the 2017 Gruber Foundation Cosmology Prize winner.

The prize comes with a $500,000 cash award and a gold medal that Faber will receive this fall.

Faber is a retired but still working UC-Santa Cruz astronomy professor whose work really started when she was a little girl peering at the stars through her fathers binoculars.

Shes spent her life researching the formation of galaxies and the evolution of the universe.

The origin of galaxies is one of the fundamental questions of astronomy and thats what Ive been studying, Faber said. The good news is that we now understand where galaxies come from.

In 1984, Faber co-authored an article that outlined the process.

The hypothesis is to go back a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, when the temperature was a billion. billion, billion degrees, Faber said. At that time, physics was different and there was a new kind of gravity in the universe that made the universe expand faster than the speed of light.

The theory is called inflation, Faber said.

When the universe inflated, it generated small-density fluctuations that acted as seeds for normal gravity, Faber said. That drew matter in around them, creating lumps that were really more like clouds of gas. The gas made stars, and those are the galaxies we see.

Although astronomy wont put a chicken in the pot or a car in the garage, Faber says its important because it tells us where we came from, who we are and provides a prediction of our cosmic future.

Earths cosmic future is fabulous, Faber said.

Weve been given the gift of a billion years of cosmic time, and we should not screw it up, she said. But at the rate were using up our planets natural resources and fouling our own nest means were not going to last a billion years.

Which explains why she has taken to public speaking on the topic of Cosmic Knowledge and the Future of the Human Race.

Im still looking for my voice, she said. Its hard because its a message nobody wants to hear.

To hear Fabers message, visit youtube.com and input Sandra Faber into the search bar. Several speeches are posted there, including a TEDx Los Gatos talk.

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Updated Kepler catalog contains 219 new exoplanet candidates – Astronomy Now Online

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NASAs Kepler space telescope team has identified 219 new planet candidates, 10 of which are near-Earth size and in the habitable zone of their star. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Scientists have published a catalog of exoplanet discoveries made by NASAs Kepler space telescope, identifying 219 previously-unknown planet candidates circling stars elsewhere in the galaxy, including 10 would-be worlds that appear to be about the same size of Earth with temperatures potentially hospitable for life.

Culling data collected during the first four years of Keplers mission, researchers used computers to pick out and analyse signals from stars that could be have caused by nearby planets. Automated software identified the detections most likely to be real worlds, according to Susan Thompson, a Kepler research scientist at the SETI Institute and NASAs Ames Research Center who led the cataloging effort.

This is the last search that we performed, and we used our most improved techniques, and with that we found 4,034 candidates, which include 10 new terrestrial-sized candidates in the habitable zone of their star, Thompson said.

Follow-up observations have, so far, confirmed 2,335 of the more than 4,000 candidate worlds discovered by Kepler are real. The 10 new Earth-sized exoplanet candidates identified by Kepler scientists bring the missions total haul to 49 likely worlds about the same size as our home planet that could have the right temperature to harbour liquid water, Thompson said.

Thirty of the 49 Earth-sized planets have been verified.

This new result presented today has implications for understanding the frequency of different types of planets in our galaxy, and helps us to advance our knowledge of of how planets are formed, said Mario Perez, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters.

The four years of data covered in the exoplanet catalog come from Keplers observations of around 200,000 stars in the constellation Cygnus. Using a 37-inch (95-centimetre) telescope and a unique wide-angle 95-megapixel camera, Kepler looked for subtle dips in the brightness of stars in a predetermined patch of sky beginning soon after its 2009 launch on a Delta 2 rocket.

The brightness fluctuations if they occur in regular patterns could be caused by a planet transiting in front of the star, blotting out a tiny fraction of its light. Sophisticated software written specifically for the Kepler mission was tasked with rooting out false positives that could be caused by starquakes or other natural phenomena.

Thompson said scientists injected simulated transits and measured how often Kepler and its data-crunching computers missed a planet. The catalog also accounted for noise in Keplers data archive that software could have mistaken for a planet.

That is how scientists arrived at the 4,034 planet candidates from Keplers four-year observing campaign in the constellation Cygnus. Subsequent detections from other telescopes, in space or on the ground, have verified 2,335 of them to date.

These are planets where there is no question at all that that signal is coming from an exoplanet, Thompson said.

In the case of the exoplanet candidates, there is still some room for doubt whether that signal is coming from a planet, she said. It still could be coming from other astrophysical signals.

Several of the newly-discovered planet candidates orbit G dwarf stars like our sun.Thompson singled out one exoplanet candidate named KOI-7711, which is about 1.3 times the size of Earth and orbits its star every 302 days.

She said KOI-7711 gets approximately the same amount of heat that we get from our own star.

However, theres a lot we dont know about this planet, and as a result, its hard to say whether its really an Earth twin, Thompson said Monday. We need to know more about its atmosphere, whether theres water on the planet.

Alien astronomers looking into our solar system through a distant telescope could be tricked into assuming more than one planet was hospitable to life.

I always like to remind people that it looks like there are three planets in our habitable zone Venus, Earth and Mars and Id only really want to live on one of them, Thompson said.

Keplers updated exoplanet listing will help astronomers estimate how common rocky, potentially habitable planets are in our galaxy.

For M dwarfs, which are small stars that make up 75 percent of the stars, in the galaxy, we know that one out of every four of them has a planet that is small and is in the habitable zone, said Courtney Dressing, a NASA Sagan Fellow at the California Institute of Technology.

Dressing said scientists still trying to determine the ubiquity of Earth-sized planets around sun-like stars, one of the chief goals of the Kepler mission. But the catalog released this week will arm scientists with better data to answer that question.

One thing thats important for us is are we alone? Perez said Monday. And maybe Kepler today has told us indirectly although we dont have confirmation that we are probably not alone.

Statistics from the Kepler planet catalog also suggest small planets fall into two families, said Benjamin Fulton, a doctoral candidate at the University of Hawaii in Manoa.

One grouping of planets ranges from smaller than Earth to less than twice the size of Earth, and another set of planets found by Kepler measure up to four times Earths diameter. There are relatively few worlds in between, Fulton said.

Most of the planets in the first group may be akin to the Earth with rocky surfaces and little to no atmospheres, Fulton said. Planets in the second group are probably more like cousins of Neptunes with thick atmospheres and no surface to speak of.

Astronomers turned to the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii to measure the sizes of approximately 1,300 stars known to have planets. The data yielded better estimates of the planets dimensions.

Scientists believe the delineation between super-Earths and mini-Neptunes stems from the way the planets form. Some worlds suck in more hydrogen and helium, growing thick, deep atmospheres, while others develop comparatively thin atmospheres that can be blown away by stellar winds and heat.

This result has significant implications for the search for life, Fulton said. Approximately half of the planets that we know are so common have no solid surface, or a surface deep beneath the crushing weight of a thick atmosphere, and these would not be nice places to live.

Our result sharpens up the dividing line between potentially habitable planets, and those that are inhospitable to life as we know it, he said.

Keplers mission has been plagued by the failure of two of the observatorys four reaction wheels, spinning gyro-like mechanisms that kept the telescope steadily pointed at the missions star field in the constellation Cygnus.

With the loss of Keplers second reaction wheel in 2013, the telescope could no longer meet the missions original pointing requirements.

Engineers found a way to harness the pressure of photons of sunlight by positioning the spacecraft to prevent solar radiation from slowly pointing the telescope away from its astronomical targets. Although solar pressure exerts very low forces on spacecraft, the constant bombardment of solar photons can alter the orientation of satellites.

Controllers can eliminate the effects of solar pressure by balancing Kepler against the stream of sunlight, similar to balancing a pencil on a finger. The telescope cannot detect the faint signatures of planets without stable pointing.

Kepler orbits the sun at roughly the same distance as Earth. NASA calls telescopes current observing program the K2 mission.

Keeping Kepler balanced means it must be pointed in the ecliptic plane, or the plane where all the solar systems planets orbit the sun. The mitigation against solar pressure means Kepler can only look at a narrow band of stars, shifting its 100-square-degree field-of-view every two or three months to avoid pointing its sensitive camera at bright sunlight.

The new observing method means Kepler is now best-suited to finding exoplanets located very close to their host stars.

Kepler continues searching for planets, but officials expect it to run out of fuel some time next year.

The spacecraft has about 10 percent of its hydrazine fuel supply remaining, according to Jessie Dotson, the K2 missions project scientist at Ames.

We think the limiting factor is probably going to be the fuel, Dotson said.

NASAs next planet-hunting mission, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral in March 2018 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. TESS will survey the entire sky to look for exoplanet signatures around nearby, bright stars.

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Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.

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Amazon accuses Walmart of bullying in cloud computing clash – BBC News

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Amazon accuses Walmart of bullying in cloud computing clash
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Cloud-Computing Business Lifts Oracle’s Profit — Update – Fox Business

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Oracle Corp. co-founder and executive chairman Larry Ellison predicted three months ago the company's cloud-infrastructure business would "soon" grow faster than its other web-based, on-demand applications and services.

He didn't say then when soon would be. But it wasn't three months.

On Wednesday, Oracle reported fourth-quarter results that topped analysts' expectations, sending its stock soaring in after-market trading. The company also changed the way it reports its cloud-computing business.

Oracle is mixing its nascent infrastructure-as-a-service business, where it provides computing resources and storage on demand, with its more tenured business of selling access to app-management and data analytics tools, called platform-as-a-service.

In its fiscal fourth quarter, Oracle posted solid results in its cloud-infrastructure business, where it competes against leaders Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google. Revenue from the business rose 23% to $208 million.

The Redwood City, Calif., company's platform-as-a-service business, combined with its other cloud business that sells access to applications -- known as software-as-a-service -- saw revenue climb 67% to $1.15 billion for the quarter ended May 31.

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Going forward, it isn't clear whether Oracle will continue to break out its progress in the cloud-infrastructure market. On a call with analysts, co-Chief Executive Safra Catz said Oracle combined its platform and infrastructure cloud businesses because "synergies and cross-selling between these two businesses is very high."

Over all, Oracle earned a profit of $3.23 billion, or 76 a share, in its fiscal fourth quarter, up from $2.81 billion, or 66 cents a share, a year earlier. The company said adjusted per-share earnings, which commonly exclude stock-based compensation and other items, were 89 cents.

Revenue rose 2.8% to $10.89 billion. Excluding the impact of a strong U.S. dollar, revenue would have grown 4%, the company said.

According to estimates gathered by S&P Global Market Intelligence, analysts expected Oracle to earn 78 cents a share on an adjusted basis, on revenue of $10.45 billion. Shares jumped 9.5% to $50.18 in recent after-hours trading.

Mr. Ellison has made building the cloud-infrastructure business one of Oracle's key missions, saying last summer "Amazon's lead is over" after introducing Oracle's latest technology for the market.

Amazon, though, continues to pull away. Its Amazon Web Services unit, whose net sales are largely comprised of its cloud-infrastructure business, grew 43% in the most recent quarter to $3.66 billion.

To keep pace with rivals in the cloud-infrastructure market, Oracle will need to meaningfully expand its capital spending and operating expenses, Stifel Nicolaus & Co. analyst Brad Reback recently wrote in a report.

Last year alone, Amazon, Microsoft and Google spent a combined $31.54 billion in 2016 on capital expenditures and leases, much of that on data centers to deliver cloud-infrastructure services.

Oracle spent $2.02 billion on capital expenditures, up from $1.19 billion a year earlier. That, in part, led to operating margins of 34%, compared with 43% in the previous fiscal year. The company has said it doesn't believe it needs to spend as much as rivals to catch up, arguing its technology is superior.

Mr. Reback, though, believes that the company will invest more in data centers to compete in the cloud-infrastructure market.

"They will need to continue to spend $2 billion or higher a year," Mr. Reback said in an interview.

Growth in Oracle's entire cloud business is outpacing the decline in its legacy business of selling licenses to software customers run on their own servers. The cloud business grew $502 million year-over-year while Oracle's new software-license revenue fell $140 million. It is the fourth-consecutive quarter in which Oracle's cloud-revenue gains outpaced declines in its legacy software business.

Over all, revenue from new software licenses fell 5% to $2.63 billion.

The biggest piece of Oracle's software business remains its massive software-license updates and product-support operations. That segment generated $4.9 billion in revenue, a 2% gain from a year earlier.

Write to Jay Greene at Jay.Greene@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 21, 2017 17:45 ET (21:45 GMT)

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Oracle Revenue Blows Away Estimates on Surging Cloud Demand – MSPmentor

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(Bloomberg) -- Oracle Corp.s push into cloud computing is picking up momentum, sparking a fourth straight quarter of revenue gains for the software maker.

The company, which set a record closing high Wednesday for its shares, reported total sales that easily topped analysts estimates.

Oracles cloud businesses grew 58 percent in the fiscal fourth quarter.

Meanwhile, new software licenses, a measure thats tied to the companys traditional on-premise software offerings, declined 5 percent compared with a drop of 16 percent in the previous period.

Oracles long shift to the cloud, which lets customers access services without installing them on their own computers, is now producing more sturdy growth, indicating that the company can compete against rivals such as Salesforce.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

It benefited in particular with applications that help companies in areas such as human resources, customer relationship management and financials.

Sales for that piece of Oracles business, which was detailed for the first time in the earnings report, jumped almost 70 percent.

Everything looks very, very strong, said Joel Fishbein, an analyst at BTIG. Oracle is a legitimate and formidable cloud player.

Shares of Oracle rose as much as 12 percent in extended trading after the earnings were released. Investors have been optimistic this year with the companys stock increasing 20 percent to a record $46.33 at the close in New York.

We continue to experience rapid adoption of the Oracle Cloud, co-Chief Executive Officer Safra Catz said in a statement. This cloud hyper-growth is expanding our operating margins, and we expect earnings per share growth to accelerate in fiscal 2018.

Adjusted revenue increased 3 percent to $10.9 billion in the period ended May 31, the company said Wednesday in a statement.

On average, analysts had projected $10.5 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Profit, excluding some costs, was 89 cents a share, topping the estimate of 78 cents.

Net income rose 15 percent to $3.2 billion.

During a call with analysts, Catz said she expects adjusted revenue in constant currency to rise 4 percent to 6 percent in the current quarter.

She also projected adjusted earnings of 59 cents to 61 cents per share, adding that Oracle should see double-digit growth in earnings per share for the fiscal year.

Oracles finally turned the corner in terms of its cloud momentum, said Josh Olson, an analyst at Edward Jones. For years, its been kind of struggle. But theyve, I think, found their footing.

Oracle executives used the call to tout the interest of customers in its cloud business.

Last month, the company said that AT&T Inc., the telecommunications giant, had signed a deal to move thousands of databases to Oracles new platforms.

While it provided no revenue at all in Q4, its a very strategic win as a reference to all of our customers about the modernization of databases and the movement of them to the cloud, co-CEO Mark Hurd said during the call.

Still, the better-than-anticipated performance in the traditional business helped deliver much of the positive news in the quarter, said Pat Walravens, an analyst at JMP Securities.

The real outperformance came in the part of the business that theyre moving away from, Walravens said.

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Catching up with an interconnected federal cloud – GCN.com

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INDUSTRY INSIGHT

Traditional IT infrastructures were built for a different time, and conflict with many of the core requirements of modern day computing that is exponentially increasing the worlds connectivity expectations and requirements. Todays government must find a path that leverages disruptive technologies, such as cloud computing, without disturbing agency personnel's ability to deliver on their core missions.

As agencies try to escape the legacy systems built decades ago, benefits such as cost and energy savings are compelling them to move to cloud environments. In 2011, the White House rolled out the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy was rolled out to address the fact that it can take years to build new data centers for new digital services, or months to increase capacity of existing data center services. The start-small approach enabled by cloud computing lets agencies provision capacity incrementally so they can develop and test applications with smaller initial investments than traditional IT models allow. At the same time, the nature of some expenses change from being capital investments in hardware and infrastructure to a pay-as-you go model, making the cloud was very appealing.

However, a 2014 assessment by the Government Accountability Office revealed that government cloud adoption is lagging often because existing legacy systems are not due to be modernized or replaced. This, coupled with other challenges -- such as the decentralized structure of technology investments, lengthy procurement processes, complexities in identifying and then managing an appropriate migration path to the cloud, data governance/control issues, lack of insight into vendor technologies and capabilities and concern about vendor lock-in -- has severely impacted the success of cloud adoption.

However, understanding how an agency fits into the use cases for government is the first step in justifying the switch to the cloud. Other reasons include capabilities for the following:

Data analytics on demand. By integrating on-premises computers with pay-per-use cloud computing resources in a seamless user experience, government big data analysts working with massive datasets can shave wait times down to a fraction of an hour.

Distributing applications to users. With smaller footprints in more geographically dispersed collection points connected to the cloud for computing power, agencies can decrease latency, improve reliability and reduce network costs.

Internet of things. By integrating existing systems with various cloud platforms that can seamlessly share data, agencies can provide new digital products and services to demonstrate rapid innovation.

Disaster recovery and continuity of operations. Unplanned outages occur for reasons as routine as human error or hardware failure, and as extreme as natural disasters or acts of terrorism. Simple and cost-effective geographic distribution of disaster recovery sites or mix-and-match cloud services give agencies the redundancy and resiliency they need to still deliver, even in the event of a disaster.

Multicloud flexibility. A multicloud environment introduces the ability to seamlessly use compute power from multiple cloud providers or to easily migrate data from one cloud to another.

The interconnected cloud ecosystem

As government is pushed to think digitally, hybrid and multicloud environments are being seen as the logical next step in the value chain since integrating users, services, capacity and connectivity creates a much better user experience. Connectivity across clouds could be the most important feature of all, as standalone cloud environments can be as isolating as traditional IT infrastructure.

Some agencies have turned to the public internet to connect to clouds only to find that security and performance issues in using the public internet introduce more hurdles. Others have explored establishing dedicated links (via multiprotocol label switching extensions) from their network to each chosen cloud provider. However, this approach is expensive, requires more connections, takes months to provision and leads to vendor lock-in.

To achieve the promise of digital transformation, an interconnected government must use a new strategy to directly and securely connect people, locations, clouds and data. Integrating an interconnection-first approach with a cloud-first strategy enables digital users to gain access to multiple clouds from any location or any device. This paradigm accelerates a new level of interconnection to the multicloud environment and gives users the following benefits:

Government cloud pioneers are demonstrating real and significant cost savings. They are getting unprecedented abilities to scale up and down quickly, are not being locked in and even get enhanced levels of security. Although each agency has a unique mission, security requirements and IT landscapes, the benefits of an interconnected government address every possible scenario.

An interconnected cloud ecosystem creates a high-speed fabric of globally distributed cloud-based points of presence, expanded out to the digital edge. Just as the General Services Administration's Data Center Shared Services Marketplace is envisioned to be the central location where agencies can choose from an inventory of data center services, automated management tools and products to achieve efficiency and cost savings, an interconnected cloud ecosystem offers a neutral marketplace for providers and consumers to come together.

The government cloud marketplace is maturing, and agencies are becoming both providers and consumers of cloud services. This opens up new avenues for shared services. In order to fulfill the potential for an interconnected government, this platform layer of digital services requires participation by the broadest ecosystem of network and service providers so agencies can take advantage of all that digital transformation can offer.

About the Author

Jody McCann is senior director for government strategy and partnerships at Equinix.

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