Private sector knowledge to lead the government into the cloud

By Jim Sheaffer

Federal CIO, Vivek Kundra, and Commerce Secretary, Gary Locke, earlier this year expressed interest in a report from TechAmerica on how the United States can use cloud technologies to remain competitive in a rapidly changing global technology landscape.

TechAmerica is an organization dedicated to educating leaders from all sectors about the vital role technology plays in U.S. international leadership and competitiveness. They responded to the Obama Administration by creating the TechAmerica Commission on the Leadership Opportunity in U.S. Deployment of the Cloud, otherwise known as CLOUD2.

TechAmerica divided the CLOUD2 commission into two divisions: a public and a commercial sector division; each headed by a vice-chair. The public sector division selected me as vice-chair, and we are responsible for recommending ways the federal government can overcome barriers to adopting cloud technologies.

The choice to reach out to TechAmerica and create this commission was a visionary step on the part of the Obama Administration.

It’s often been said that private industry needs to partner with the federal government to help implement the policies and technologies that are driving private enterprise. When it comes to helping the federal government implement cloud-based solutions, who better to do so than the corporations that not only sell these solutions but also have adopted them? The challenges and roadblocks that they have faced and overcome can provide best practices and lessons to the federal agencies now looking to do the same.

The roadmap that private enterprises have put into place for transitioning towards cloud environments is there for public entities to follow. For many of these private companies, the following four areas created challenges that needed to be overcome when migrating towards the cloud:

Security, Transparency and Accountability
The migration of workloads from datacenters into the cloud raises questions about security. With multiple available cloud environments, including public, private and community cloud environments, it can be confusing to determine which is correct for individual workload.
Human Capital and Organizational Change
Not every organization is staffed with the skills to provision or manage cloud infrastructure or to develop applications that will not only run in the cloud, but are optimized to fully leverage all that it has to offer. While the self-managed public cloud has many users, it may require skills that the enterprise may not have. Also, IT departments that traditionally functioned to maintain datacenters now find themselves with different and unique missions to accomplish.
Acquisition, Budget and Execution
Although the cost of adopting different cloud environments can be much less expensive than the provisioning of a traditional datacenter, there are still upfront costs to consider when purchasing cloud solutions. Since the result of a move to the cloud is often cost savings over time, it can be difficult to find budget dollars and justify the initial expense for cloud solutions.
Infrastructure and Application Management
When officially moving towards the cloud as an agency, it may become apparent that IT departments and branches within the agency had already begun to experiment with cloud applications or casually move systems such as email. This creates a need to establish governance, create processes and define organizational roles and responsibilities in an effort to regain control of rogue cloud users.
As vice-chair of the public sector group, I lead a commission of 45 senior level executives at major IT companies such as Google, Amazon, Lockheed Martin, Accenture, General Dynamic, and Verizon. Each of these organizations has worked to adopt cloud solutions within their organizations and at other private enterprises. Ultimately, the combined knowledge and experience of the individuals involved will be put into a report designed to help the federal government avoid the roadblocks that many private enterprises encountered on their way to the cloud.

Cloud computing is a technology with great promise. I am pleased to be able to help position the federal government to take maximum advantage of the benefits this new technology offers.