Don’t wait around for the next wave in technology. Cloud computing is here to stay. You’ll have to deal with it sooner or later.
That was the message from IT managers attending annual FOSE conference in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday from a panel of top federal CIOs.
“At the end of the day, it’s a technology trend that is inevitable,” said David McClure (pictured above, left), associate administrator for citizen services and innovative technologies at the General Services Administration. “It’s not as though anyone can stick their head in the sand and say, ‘I’ll wait for the next thing to come.'”
There are countless examples-hundreds, maybe thousands–of successful cloud implementations in the federal government.” – David McClure
The government is making “a tremendous amount of progress in implementing cloud computing,” McClure said. “There are countless examples-hundreds, maybe thousands–of successful cloud implementations in the federal government.”
Nonetheless, the government’s adoption of cloud computing is still in the early stages and challenges lie ahead, panelists said.
“It’s like any other technology. It’s got to evolve,” McClure said. “It has to factor its way into the nuances of public-sector budgeting and decision making, and the pace and direction of government. That’s what we’re witnessing right now. We have some agencies that are further ahead, and we have some agencies that haven’t really done anything but put their toe in the water.”
A lot of agencies are still going through what McClure called “the decisional process” of determining what applications and services are suitable for migration to the cloud and what type of cloud environment is appropriate-commercial or private, for example.
At the Defense Department, IT officials are in the process of standardizing the computing environment across DoD, which is “a tall order,” deputy CIO Robert Carey (pictured above, center) told the audience.
“We’re creating a more homogeneous network architecture across the four services–the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, and the other DoD [agencies]–for more efficient [network] provision and [to provide] access to information from any device, at anytime, anywhere around the planet,” he said.
As the project evolves, standardization across DoD–which includes data center consolidation–will produce a cloud computing environment, he said.
“We will create the place where there’s a space for other cloud providers…because a capacity gap will exist between our [computing] demand and our capacity,” Carey said. “We are shrinking our capacity right now because we have to–we have 800-plus data centers and we got do with a number a lot less than that.”
Because DoD is so vast, officials are deploying standardization “at a very deliberate pace,” Carey said.
“We don’t want to create an environment where there are a thousand clouds out there. That’s going to be a challenge,” he said.
McClure and Carey, members of the federal CIO Council, are counting on the nascent FedRamp program, which will furnish agencies with a framework for acquiring cloud services, to help ease migration to the cloud for agencies.
“FedRamp will provide an ability to be consistent within agencies,” Carey said. “As we approach [the adoption of] the FedRamp standards, we will be looking at this from the perspective of trying to standardize and not allow a thousand clouds inside of DOD to form up and create the opposite effect of what was intended.”
Meanwhile, GSA has already moved some services to the cloud, including to Google for email.
“It’s been wildly successful,” he said.