It’s not as though federal CIOs are a bunch of fast-moving entrepreneurs who recognized the disruptive potential of the cloud and moved with lightening speed to seize the opportunity. That’s only partly true—the part about seizing an opportunity. They certainly have done that, spurred on by the Office of Management and Budget’s “cloud first” policy.
In other words, government IT teams moved to the cloud because they had no choice. Federal IT spending has been flat for the past four years, and agencies are in the midst of a data consolidation initiative that has resulted in the closing of hundreds of data centers, with more closures to come. With little extra money to spend and a shrinking data center footprint, Uncle Sam was forced to find new ways to deliver IT resources, both internally and to the public.
Agencies are deploying commercial cloud services, private clouds, shared clouds, and hybrid clouds and they’re using new policies, processes, and tools to scale clouds to the vast size and unique requirements of the US government. Not everything has gone smoothly, but with dozens of clouds now deployed across the government, there’s no doubting the progress.
I’ve been closely following the federal cloud strategy from the start, and I have talked to dozens of government CIOs and IT pros about how they’re building and deploying clouds . Based on that background, here’s my list of the top 10 things (ranked in order of importance) that the feds have done to overcome challenges and make the cloud a viable and sustainable alternative to old-school IT.
1. Private clouds. Government agencies have been early adopters of private clouds because they offer the best of both worlds—the requisite efficiencies, plus security and close control over the cloud environment. Federal IT teams are deploying private clouds in myriad configurations, including optimized servers and appliances with cloud software tightly integrated and mobile clouds that can be deployed in a shipping container.
2. FedRAMP. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) serves as an official stamp of approval that a cloud environment satisfies the government’s rigorous security requirements. FedRAMP, which is still in its early stages, streamlines an otherwise tedious and drawn-out vetting process. Agencies don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time they want to bring in a cloud provider for the first time. In addition to expediting cloud adoption, FedRAMP should lower acquisition costs.
3. Software as a service. Federal agencies are aggressively tapping into SaaS, and not just for e-mail and calendar apps. They’re increasingly using SaaS to provide government employees with advanced CRM and what
4. Cloud brokers. What if an organization wants access to not one or two clouds but to many different clouds, depending on changing business requirements? The answer is a cloud broker, which, through a combination of technology and IT management processes, makes it possible to switch among cloud A, cloud B, cloud C, and more as needed. The Defense Information Systems Agency and the General Services Administration are employing this concept as a way to give agencies added flexibility in cloud planning and deployment.
5. Everything as a service. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has taken software as a service to the next level by offering a dozen IT and business capabilities as services to its component organizations. Some examples: business intelligence as a service, case management as a service, authentication as a service, and identity proofing as a service. And DHS didn’t limit itself to a single cloud model; nine of its services are offered from a private cloud and three from a public cloud.
6. Shared-service clouds. If efficiency is the goal, then why not maximize the gains by developing cloud platforms and services that can be shared across agencies and departments? That’s the smart thinking behind the IT Shared Services Strategy introduced last year by federal CIO Steven VanRoekel. And this isn’t some vague, toothless mandate that exists in a vacuum. Implementation is aligned with the Federal Enterprise Architecture and a growing service catalog makes it easy for agencies to pick and choose from what’s available.
7. Big data in the cloud. Federal agencies are leaders in figuring out how to use the extreme scalability of the cloud model to support data volumes that are growing into petabytes and exabytes. (See my column, “As Big Data Explodes, Get Ready for Exabytes and Beyond.”) The CIA and other intelligence agencies have been blazing the trail here, and other government agencies and businesses alike will benefit from the foundational work they’ve done to match big data requirements with the cloud’s elasticity.
8. The million-user cloud. Like many businesses, the US Army had a stitched-together fabric of e-mail systems that was onerous and expensive to manage. Multiple e-mail directories made it difficult for users to find colleagues across the far-flung military branch. So in 2010, the US Army set out to replace its patchwork e-mail environment with an enterprisewide cloud called Defense Enterprise E-mail. A few months ago, the US Army announced a remarkable accomplishment: more than 1 million users have now been migrated to the system.
9. APIs in the cloud. Under the auspices of open government, federal agencies are making more of their data available for public consumption and they’re using the cloud to do it. The Department of Energy has developed a Green Energy API that provides access to data on renewable energy and energy efficiency and an Electricity API with data on fuel quality, consumption, and sales. Department of Energy CIO Robert Brese says in a blog post that the cloud provides “easy, scalable access” to the Department of Energy’s data.
10. Mars mission cloud. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is using cloud services to make images of Mars taken by its Curiosity rover available not just to NASA scientists, but to the rest of us as well. As a result, this remarkable undertaking has become a widely shared, media-rich experience for millions of people around the world.
Are you impressed with the progress that federal agencies are making in the cloud? Leave a comment, e-mail me here, or follow me on Twitter at @jfoley09.
For further reading, check out:
The Top 10 Myths About Cloud Computing
