VCE & Harris Team on Fed 'Cyber Condos'

While Army General Keith Alexander, commander of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency was selling Capitol Hill on a smooth migration to the cloud, a strategic alliance was being announced between Harris, EMC and VCE to develop and market trusted cloud solutions.

Making the case for the cloud

General Alexander was making the case for shifting the Defense Department to cloud computing as a means to secure, simplify, consolidate and save on department networks, as well as boost cyber defenses. Just hours before Alexander's testimony to a House subcommittee Harris Corp, EMC's RSA Security division and the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE)  Company announced a strategic alliance to jointly develop and market new trusted multi-tenant cloud solutions to further accelerate the adoption of cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) by commercial and government enterprises.

Harris Data Center

In May Harris plans to open a 140,000 square foot Cyber Integration Center at an undisclosed site in Virginia. The data center would house stacks of computers, called Vblocks, provided by VCE, a company formed by Cisco, EMC, and VMware. The Vblocks would store data for government customers. RSA would provide the network security software for the facility.

“What bothers the intelligence community is that right now they don’t believe that you can guarantee the authority, trust and authentication of data in that environment,” said retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Dale Meyerrose, a former chief information officer for the U.S. intelligence community, and now vice president and general manager of Harris Cyber Integrated Solutions.

RSA and VCE will jointly market the Harris Trusted Enterprise Cloud services as a centralized, efficient approach for government agencies to build multi-tenancy 'cyber condominiums'.

VCE

The Virtual Computing Company was formed by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware and Intel with the goal of developing converged infrastructure and cloud computing models. The Vblock platform presents a prepackaged, integrated IT offering from all vendors.

VCE also recently announced a major expansion in Richardson, Texas.  The expansion is a $2.45 million Texas Enterprise Fund investment in VCE, in conjunction with the plans to establish its headquarters in Richardson.  They are planning 434 new high-paying jobs and generate an estimated $35 million capital investment.  VCE currently has U.S. operations in Dallas, Massachusetts and Silicon Valley.