Industry Perspectives of Federal Cloud Computing at FOSE
March 12 – Visitors to FOSE will be able to follow the cloud computing wargame as it evolves on plasma screens at Booz Allen's booth
The federal government will have to overcome numerous challenges in order to harness the power of cloud computing, but the potential is there to transform how it fulfills many of its missions, according to a panel of experts at Booz Allen Hamilton’s FOSE capstone event held March 11.
For one thing, “’the government’ is one word, but the truth is, it’s a lot of agencies, a lot of institutions,” said Drew Cohen, vice president of Booz Allen, "each with its own mission, its own culture, and its own budget."
That leads to the risk that instead of moving to a multi-tenancy environment, where agencies share those functions they have in common, instead they each pursue their own cloud computing strategy.
“I had a customer tell me there’s a rainstorm coming,” said Susan Adams, chief technology officer for Microsoft’s federal civilian practice, “that there will be all these clouds and none are going to talk to each other.”
To surmount that hurdle, according to Michael Farber, vice president of Booz Allen, a governmentwide framework has to be created.
“I don’t think the cloud has any hope of offering any promise to government if it’s not architected properly,” he said. “What we’re talking about [today] is supply-side … Unless you can get a real handle on the demand side, you’re going to have a real performance gap. Unless we can think strategically and operationally, … instead of having 150 different data centers, we’re going to have 150 clouds.”
C.J. Moses, senior manager-federal sector for Amazon, said that agencies are moving toward providing that guidance. There are technologies available today to support cloud computing for massive organizations, if the standards are defined first.
Another obstacle to moving to cloud computing is the lack of knowledge in most agencies of the true cost of ownership for their IT capabilities. IBM’s Adams cited email as an example of the problem.
“If you ask federal customers, do you know how much it costs to run email, they don’t really look at things that way today,” she said. That makes it much more difficult to demonstrate the cost benefits of moving to the cloud, especially when some agencies might have to make some concessions on design.
David Mihalchik, with Google’s business development-federal sector business, agreed that calculating TCO is especially important in the current economic climate. Office of Management and Budget figures show that almost 40 percent of the federal budget is spent on infrastructure, support and management, he said; half a billion dollars alone is spent on electric power for government-owned data centers, and that doesn’t count the data centers contracted out.
The most commonly expressed fear about moving to cloud computing is security, the panelists agreed.
“The question about security is fundamentally germane to cloud computing,” Cohen said. “There are missions in the government where, when security is compromised, people die. When we think about security, where it’s a more mission critical element, [it] leads to not having a one-size answer.”
While the difficulties facing the government in moving to cloud computing are tremendous, they are not new, nor unique to this technology.
“We have talked about utility computing for at least 10 years now,” said Fred Maymir-Ducharme, executive client architect with IBM Federal Systems. “The real key, I think, is that we’ve finally got to the place where standards will allow what we talked about 10 years ago.”
Beyond the cost savings, the upside potential in cloud computing is in advanced analytics, he said: “What have we wanted to do before that was so large that we couldn’t do it?” As systems get more complex, as the need for modeling and simulation capabilities continues to expand, the ability to use cloud computing to tap huge resources to apply to those models will encourage government customers to make the move.
“I think it’s an evolutionary process – look at it the right way and take small steps, be cautious [and] cost-effective,” Adams said.
