Tuesday: Health data, cloud competition, FDCCI

The ROI on M&A. Mergers and acquisitions often make sense for defense contractors, AOL Gov reports. “From a government buyer perspective, however, the question of whether benefits accrue from M&As is very much an open one.”

Cops and the cloud. Law enforcement is looking to the cloud, according to a new report from the IBM Center for the Business of Government. “Cloud computing…provides a potential for cost-savings for law enforcement, since law enforcement organizations don’t have to use their tight budgets to build their own information technology infrastructure.”

Upping the ante in cloud infrastructure. Google announced a wide range of new cloud services this week, Giga Om reports. The move should "give pause to people who doubt that Google is serious about providing cloud infrastructure services for business users."

Hacking healthcare. “Health IT hacktivist” Fred Trotter has used Freedom of Information Act requests to pull doctor referral data from the Medicare System, Wired reports. "Ultimately, Trotter is looking to build a rating system of doctors informed by data he plans to pry out of insurance companies and state and federal health agencies."

Getting to the un-Googleable. Google recently conducted a Daily Information Needs Study, according to MIT Technology Review, as a way to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.”

Better measurement for data-center consolidation? As agencies continue to close data centers, GCN reports, "the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative... will be integrated more closely with PortfolioStat."