Federal Government Continues on Cloud Computing Path
The government is showing greater comfort in moving services to the cloud, some cloud service providers said Wednesday during a FedScoop event at the Newseum. While agencies are embracing cloud platforms for some of their workloads, there are still challenges around the procurement and acquisition process, they said. The real opportunity for federal and commercial is workload movement, said David McClure, associate administrator at the General Services Administration’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies. “It’s not about picking an entire system up and arbitrarily moving into a cloud.” It’s more about data, how it’s managed and moving it around secure environments “and through existing policy arrangements the government has set up for privacy and security,” he said.
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There’s movement toward the private and public cloud, said Susie Adams, Microsoft Federal’s chief technology officer. “It’s not just public cloud [for] citizen-facing apps and email collaboration,” she said. For data center consolidation and sensitive workloads, some agencies are taking a step beyond traditional virtualization, she said. Some are beginning to dabble in “platform-as-a-service,” but there’s no big pickup so far, she added.
In the infrastructure space, the cloud is white hot, said Cameron Chehreh, chief enterprise engineer at General Dynamics Information Technology. “I'm seeing IT (information technology) departments that were traditionally a bit more stoic becoming much more responsive and agile in their approach from an infrastructure perspective.” Adoption of platform-as-a-service is emerging in the national intelligence space, he said. Due to the critical nature of their applications, “they're looking for integration companies to come in and help them migrate applications and use more fluid platforms for cost savings,” but “more importantly to rapidly, dynamically be able to reconfigure the applications based on the nature of the mission they're going after,” he said. Platform-as-a-service offers portability and interoperability, said Gunnar Hellekson, Red Hat’s chief technology strategist. “People are absolutely terrified of having moved a workload into someone’s infrastructure and then never being able to get it back out."
The public cloud allows agencies to experiment with their public-facing websites, said Mark Ryland, Amazon Web Services chief solutions architect. The cloud “is a natural platform for experimentation,” he said. Using public cloud for these sites allows entities “to try things and fail fast,” Ryland said. AWS also offers a virtual private cloud capability, which gives customers private addressing capability, “so all of your network flows are under your control."
Some agencies are turning to the cloud to help them figure out “big data” management, the technology executives said. There’s a tremendous amount of activity in big data, Ryland said. The 1,000 Genomes Project from the National Institutes of Health democratized research in a dramatic way “because you can get to the data, it’s publicly available, and you can run [and] compute workloads and shut down when you're not running them,” he said. An agency can use the cloud to figure out how to get census data “into a gigantic database that has familiar and easy-to-use tools that citizens and agencies can use from a business intelligence perspective,” Adams said. The data can be mashed up and stored in the cloud or behind a firewall, she said.
The government must move beyond its traditional procurement process, Adams said. Currently, vendors respond to the request for proposal and don’t talk to the customer, she said. The agencies want “to come in and touch the computers” and they want full access. The customer isn’t supposed to worry about it, she said: “If we were to allow customers to come in and tweak the underlying operating systems … or run a vulnerability scan on a shared piece of infrastructure, we'd be defeating the purpose of cloud computing.” Government needs to view the private sector as partners, Chehreh said. Cloud providers will complement and help the government with the IPv6 transition, he said. “Our infrastructures have to adapt and change and be ahead of to continue to add value for what the government’s doing.” More acquisition reform is needed, he added.