Issue 6, Oct/Nov 2009
FOCUS CLOUD UPDATE
THE US GOVERNMENT’S CLOUD AMBITIONS
White House CIO makes switch to cloud computing to cut infrastructure spending his first priority A
round the end of August, US President Barack Obama’s administration nearly lost its freshly appointed CIO to NASA.
When the American space agency’s deputy administrator, Lori Garver, first met Vivek Kundra (the CIO) in Washington DC, she told him the agency was looking for an information chief. Kundra got excited and wondered whether he should apply.
“He told me he was so excited because he looked all over our government to find… an example of innovation in IT and it was here at Ames where he found it,” Garver recalls. “In the Nebula cloud computing arena.”
Ames is a NASA research centre based in Silicon Valley, and Nebula is the agency’s cloud computing platform developed there.
Out of loyalty to the administration, Kundra stayed put. After all, Obama had only appointed the nation’s first Federal CIO in March, and she was appointed as NASA’s second-in-command in July.
“Of course, I said I could not possibly do that to the President and decided I just wanted Kundra to help us find someone who would carry on this great innovation at Ames,” she recalls.
It should be no surprise that Kundra is excited about cloud computing. In the coming months and years, the US government is looking to shift as many applications to cloud-based services as it can.
In September, NASA hosted a press conference at Ames, where Kundra outlined the Obama administration’s IT strategy going forward.
SPENDING OUT OF CONTROL “We spend more than $76bn (£46bn) in information technology,” he says. “We serve over 300 million customers across the country with more than 10,000 systems.”
Until now Federal agencies have been undergoing the same process as the private sector to accommodate growth: building more
The General Services Administration (GSA) learned the value of cloud computing when it revamped the Federal government’s website
www.usa.gov. Instead of taking more than six months to upgrade the platform and spending $2.5m each year to support the portal, the GSA moved the site onto Terremark’s Enterprise Cloud platform.
So far the administration is happy with the choice it made. According to Kundra, the government is spending $800,000 instead of the aforementioned $2.5m, and applying an upgrade takes less than 24 hours.
THE STRATEGY The GSA’s next step into the cloud came in September, when it launched
www.apps.gov – a web portal that government agencies can use to purchase cloud-based IT services on a pay-as-you-go basis from private providers. Its first customer was the Department of Energy, which began using the site on the day it launched.
Kundra: ‘We want to get out of running infrastructure’
data centers and buying more applications. This approach has led to sprawling capital costs and a doubling of the amount of energy that Federal IT consumes.
EXPLOSIVE BUDGET The annual IT budget grew by about $30bn during the past decade. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the annual Federal server and data center electricity consumption rose from approximately three billion kilowatts per hour in 2000 to more than six billion kilowatts per hour in 2006.
From the current budget, $19bn is spent on infrastructure build-out. Kundra’s mission is to remove government IT from that trajectory.
“We want to get out of running… infrastructure,” he says. While there are systems that the government must run itself for security purposes, “there are a whole class of solutions… where we could literally leverage some of the consumer technologies that are out there”.
The
www.apps.gov website is an example of the first instalment of the government’s three-part cloud strategy: simplification of the acquisition process.
The second part includes prioritising cloud computing in the current year’s Federal budget, and a number of pilot programmes built to identify and move government applications to the cloud. The 2011 budget will include direct guidance for agencies for moving toward deployment of cloud- based services.
The final part of the strategy involves policy changes aimed mostly at security issues associated with cloud services. “And we are challenging the industry to also step up and address some of the security concerns of the Federal government,” Kundra says.
Prior to his current appointment, Kundra worked for Washington DC Mayor Adrian Fenty as the district’s CTO. Before coming to Washington, he served as the assistant secretary of commerce and technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia.
www.datacenterdynamics.com 61
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