President Barak Obama recently (in March) appointed Vivek Kundra as Chief Information Officer for the US government, a new position needed to bring US Government IT policies and spending under control.  In addition to holding the purse strings for federal government spending, he is also responsible for directing technology development strategies (and hopefully national tech leadership strategies).  President Obama announced the position with the statement "I have directed him to work to ensure that we are using the spirit of American innovation and the power of technology to improve performance and lower the cost of government operations."

In a recent speech at the Potomac Officer's Club in Washington DC, Kundra stated "for too long the federal government has had a self-image that it can't innovate - I reject that view."   Kundra continued to emphasize "Technology investments for technology's sake are useless, we need to be where the people are."  This includes closer government collaboration with the private sector, with a special focus on cloud computing.

One of the first steps the government is taking to support American companies working in cloud development and commercial cloud services is to assist in defining  the concept of both cloud comuting, and cloud infrastructures.  This task was given to the non-regulatory National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).  While this might seem a bit pretentious on the side of the government, the reality is the US government is by far the largest user of Information Technology in the United States. 

A large percentage of the US hardware and software industry will attempt to sell into the federal market.  Thus any attempt at standardization by NIST, which is applied to requests for proposal or other projects considered by the government, will have a major impact on product designs.  Companies will have to ensure their products will meet the minimum standards set by NIST, and that standard will subsequently flow into the commercial side of product development.

The government has already started pushing various agencies into both private and commercial clouds.  The first move into cloud architecture was completed on May 1^st, with the government portal USA.gov becoming the first Internet-facing portal run entirely on a commercial cloud service.  The GSA believes that moving USA.gov to cloud infrastructure may save the US government up to 90% on previous costs incurred operating the portal from a dedicated data center.  In addition, USA.gov will benefit being in a commercial data center with high carrier and network availability, giving consumers a much better product - with considerably improved performance.  Upgrades to compute and storage capacity are all event-driven and on-demand.  The GSA has certified the cloud infrastructure meets all physical and logical security requirements.

The Washington Post's columnist Kim Hart recently wrote that commercial companies are also using their clout to pressure the US government into an even more rapid adoption of cloud computing.  No surprise the same companies, including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and NetSuite promote the idea "If it works for business, why not for the government?"  And of course as the government adopts cloud computing, the vendors benefit from potential huge sales into the government market. 

Given the current economy, the new administration, and the rapid development of powerful cloud computing platforms, we are in a unique point in time.  We are at a point where if we aggressively execute on ICT (information and communications technology) initiatives then both the government and commercial industry can create jobs, reduce operating costs on IT infrastructure, and even potentially create "green" infrastructure through use of more efficient hardware and modern data center designs.  Good for the government, good for Americans.

Government Data Center Consolidation

The number of data centers operated by the federal government and states is huge.  While it is difficult to get accurate stats from the federal government, state governments tend to be much more transparent. 

South Carolina, for example (according to Tod Newcombe, Government Technology News), currently runs 11 separate data centers to manage various divisions within the government.  They plan to consolidate all data centers into a single data center through a combination of data center outsourcing and modernization.  Pennsylvania has a similar plan, with an effort to consolidate 18 data centers into a single operation.  Pennsylvania still operates legacy mainframe systems, including IBM mainframes, UNISYS, DEC, and other far-beyond end of life platforms.

South Carolina cites six key advantages: modernization, better management, more efficient use of resources, technological compatibility, better security and financial rewards. Of all these benefits, modernization is the key reason consolidation is important.

Next Steps as an Industry

Nobody objects to business taking every possible advantage to get ahead in their market.  Nobody believes it is a bad thing for innovators to aggressively seek out and meet the challenges of entering new markets.  The difficulty arises when several large, influential companies insist on trying to corner their markets through a combination of gaining market share, as well as securing that market share through the use of proprietary technologies.  In a B2B (business to business) relationship, the ease of doing business together has a big impact on development of relationships and partnerships.

Clearly defined standards for data transfer and architecture make it easier for companies to interconnect their order, fulfillment, and accounting systems to support supply chain or book to bank systems.  Proprietary standards or systems impede the ability for companies who choose to use different vendors of either hardware or software to easily interconnect their systems.

The cloud community is currently working off two competing sets of standards, including the Open Cloud Manifesto supported by IBM, Cisco, and more than 175 others - and the DMTF (distributed management task force) supported by companies including Microsoft, Oracle, VM Ware, and others.  Some companies are supporting both standards, however there is still quite a bit of industry politics and negotiating being done to try and hammer out a single standard for hardware and software companies to use as their model for development.

The government does not want to interfere with private sector development, however wisely is setting the groundwork for all competing standards groups to have at least one common framework for developing their system.  This is through the NIST's definition of cloud computing.

This is a very positive step, in in our opinion a very good indication that the new government is on the right track.

John Savageau - Long Beach, California http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnsavageau

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NIST Definition of Cloud Computing:

Cloud computing is a pay-per-use model for enabling available, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is comprised of five key characteristics, three delivery models, and four deployment models.

Key Characteristics:

• On-demand self-service. A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed without requiring human interaction with each service's provider.
• Ubiquitous network access. Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms (e.g., mobile phones, laptops, and PDAs).
• Location independent resource pooling. The provider's computing resources are pooled to serve all consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand. The customer generally has no control or knowledge over the exact location of the provided resources. Examples of resources include storage, processing, memory, network bandwidth, and virtual machines.
• Rapid elasticity. Capabilities can be rapidly and elastically provisioned to quickly scale up and rapidly released to quickly scale down. To the consumer, the capabilities available for rent often appear to be infinite and can be purchased in any quantity at any time.

Pay per use. Capabilities are charged using a metered, fee-for-service, or advertising based billing model to promote optimization of resource use. Examples are measuring the storage, bandwidth, and computing resources consumed and charging for the number of active user accounts per month. Clouds within an organization accrue cost between business units and may or may not use actual currency.

Note: Cloud software takes full advantage of the cloud paradigm by being service oriented with a focus on statelessness, low coupling, modularity, and semantic interoperability.

Delivery Models:

• Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS). The capability provided to the consumer is to use the provider's applications running on a cloud infrastructure and accessible from various client devices through a thin client interface such as a Web browser (e.g., web-based email). The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure, network, servers, operating systems, storage, or even individual application capabilities, with the possible exception of limited user-specific application configuration settings.
• Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS). The capability provided to the consumer is to deploy onto the cloud infrastructure consumer-created applications using programming languages and tools supported by the provider (e.g., java, python, .Net). The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure, network, servers, operating systems, or storage, but the consumer has control over the deployed applications and possibly application hosting environment configurations.
• Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The capability provided to the consumer is to rent processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure but has control over operating systems, storage, deployed applications, and possibly select networking components (e.g., firewalls, load balancers).

Deployment Models:

• Private cloud. The cloud infrastructure is owned or leased by a single organization and is operated solely for that organization.
• Community cloud. The cloud infrastructure is shared by several organizations and supports a specific community that has shared concerns (e.g., mission, security requirements, policy, and compliance considerations).
• Public cloud. The cloud infrastructure is owned by an organization selling cloud services to the general public or to a large industry group.
• Hybrid cloud. The cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more clouds (internal, community, or public) that remain unique entities but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting).

Each deployment model instance has one of two types: internal or external. Internal clouds reside within an organizations network security perimeter and external clouds reside outside the same perimeter.