Several panels of technology experts at the annual FOSE convention in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday predicted the present hodge-podge of cloud deployments in government will eventually lead to more agility, mobility and big changes in the business model.
“Cloud computing is…increasing the agility of [government] IT,” said Ravi Kumar, group marketing director at VMware, whose virtualization products are designed to build cloud infrastructures.
The recent experience of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency (RAT) Board, for example, underscores the nimbleness of cloud computing by offering the ability to quickly stand up an application or service to meet mission goals under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to provide taxpayers with user-friendly tools to track the flow of recovery funds.
“Without using cloud computing we wouldn’t have been able to meet our legal mandates,” Shawn Kingsbury, assistant director of technology and chief information officer of the RAT Board, told the FOSE audience.
At the National Nuclear Security Administration, an autonomous agency in the Energy Department, officials are anticipating the future by concentrating their cloud efforts on user mobility.
Over the next nine to 12 months, they will be launching the first phase of an agency-wide infrastructure as a service platform that will let employees work how they want and where they want on the device of their choosing, said Travis Howerton, CTO at NNSA.
The system also will provide a unified communications capability combined with an internally hosted, business-focused social network that employees can use to “collaborate in a much richer way than they’ve ever been able to do before,” he said. “You can collaborate wherever you’re at.”
Indeed, the use of cloud-hosted social media will become more of a business driver in the government, panelists said.
The General Services Administration, for instance, “is going through tremendous change with lots of new efforts in social media,” said Mark Day, director of strategic solutions in the Office of Integrated Technology Service at GSA and former CTO at the Housing and Urban Development Department. “Chatter, Facebook and Twitter-you name the list of things and we probably are experimenting with it today.”
“Cloud and social media tools are going to change our business model in ways we’re not thinking about yet,” he said. GSA is “ready to use it to engage the public in some commentary. Let’s get our message out in new ways. Let’s get comments from the public in new ways. That’s really not at the heart of the business model yet.”
Chip Emmet, software brand executive at IBM Corp., prefers to call social media “social business.”
“I’m saying ‘social business,'” he said. “I’m not saying ‘social media.’ It’s a big difference. Just because an agency uses Facebook and Twitter and Linked In and YouTube, that’s not social business, that’s social media. It’s about how to use those same kinds of capabilities to transform the way your people work and how they communicate and coordinate together to become a social agency inside. That’s not a bad place to start with cloud.”
Emmet said that agencies should be trying to do something different and innovative in the cloud, looking forward 10 years, not looking back 10 years.
“Social business is an application solution that makes a lot of sense,” he said. “There are so many workers coming in to the [federal] workforce who expect to work this way; they’re used to using all those consumer grade tools.”
NNSA’s Howerton predicted that agencies will find it easier to procure cloud services — almost like going to a cloud supermarket.
“Cloud services brokerage,” for example, will let IT managers “seamlessly pick between multiple data-center providers and infrastructure as a service providers through a common, unified front end that makes it easy and gives the user the choice that they expect and creates a competitive environment that drops down price,” he said. “We [also] want more of a shopping cart approach so you can add a la carte services.”