Cloud Computing: Federal Agencies Follow a Pathway to the Cloud

We’ve seen that under the direction of Vivek Kundra, IT within the federal government is getting a face lift.  While IT in the federal government has had a reputation for being slow moving behemoth, that may be changing.  Efforts to squeeze more IT from the shrinking federal budget is causing Kundra to look to cloud computing.

According to Kundra’s plan laid out in December 2010, every agency in the federal government needs to identify and actually move at least three of their current services or applications to the cloud.   Kundra announced that he wants to shift 25 percent of the annual federal IT $80 billion budget to cloud computing.  That’s both an aggressive and a tough assignment for agencies which have been slow to move in the past.  Some agencies already already made efforts in moving to the cloud, like the GSA with their on-line Apps.gov web site, but the GSA has struggled with the implementation and in supplementing the web site with data services.

The situation has been complicated by cloud vendors already fighting over the potential revenues for hosting federal data services.  Google has brought a lawsuit against the Department of the Interior’s selection of Microsoft for hosting a new email system.  Late last year Microsoft claimed that Google had not obtained security clearance for its software suite before being used by agencies like the GSA.

Too often the case is that announced government goals get bogged down in redtape and bureaucracy.   While all agencies are unlikely to all be able to meet the 18-month mandate, there actually does appear to be some good progress being made.  An InformationWeek survey among government agencies found that as many as 29 percent of federal agencies have begun to use cloud services and that another 29 percent of them are on track to be using the cloud within 12 months.  That would mean that close to 60 percent of the agencies would have some activity in the cloud by the end of the next year.  If true, that’s not too bad, factoring in the fact that we are talking about the federal government, after all.

One big potential roadblock to the government efforts is security.  To combat that, at least two ways are being investigated to solve the problem, but unfortunately both solutions come with added costs, and that ultimately dilutes the incentive for moving to the cloud in the first place.  For example, both a private cloud infrastructure and security-enhanced public cloud infrastructure.   The private cloud is attractive because it provides security by much more closely and confidently controlling access.  The other route is to beef up public infrastructure security with encryption and other software.  Both require additional overhead above and beyond what is required for just setting up house in the generic public cloud, and that means more money.