Cloud Experts Make Recommendations To Spur Government Cloud Adoption

To help government managers and employees get a foothold on moving forward with cloud projects, the commission also categorized best practices for procurement across six different functions: (1) acquisitions managers; (2) program managers; (3) chief financial officers; (4) chief information officers/chief information security officers; (5) chief human capital officers; and (6) agency leadership.

Sanjay Poonen, president of SAP Global Solutions and Go-To-Market, takes IDN inside some of the thinking and the proposals from the 71-member committee.

“The eyes of the world are watching what the U.S. does. We’ve seen the U.S. lead technology revolutions with the chip, the PC, the Internet — and now it’s the cloud,” Poonen told IDN. “Every country is asking, ‘What is the U.S. doing with cloud?’ and every U.S. and state government agency can be an example for the world, and that’s a huge opportunity.”

In releasing the report, Benioff said, “The Cloud First Buyers Guide for Government provides the best practices for how agencies can evaluate and deploy cloud services, helping them make huge gains in productivity and efficiency.”

“I think basically we want to take the wisdom of things that happen in the private sector and apply those to the public sector, wherever applicable,” Poonen told IDN. “The roots of the Internet came from government, and the first advent of its use was in the public sector. During the last decade, the commercial sector has built off of all that early work and is now leading, so it’s time to bring that expertise back to the public sector.” 

Notably, Poonen added the document isn’t a sales document for the cloud, but more a roadmap for how to get started with cloud and use it most effectively. “Governments all over are looking to save costs and improve time to market for IT, and cloud has captured a lot of their interest,” he said. “This document is a guide to our roadmap to help them figure out where and how they can use cloud to best benefit for their agencies and make citizens’ lives easier.”

The report, which reflects more than 2,000 hours of work, stated the government’s successful cloud adoption should focus around four key areas:

Trust — Individuals and organizations must be confident that the cloud can meet their needs including security, privacy and availability.

Transparency — Cloud providers will earn confidence from adopters in the public sector by providing users with meaningful ways to evaluate cloud implementations. Further, all vendors need to share relevant and reliable information about their capabilities to build trust in the system.
 
Transformation –– The commission sees the need for transformation — not just in technology, but in education and procurement.

In summary, the report states: The federal government must change how it acquires technology. Further, there needs to be an investment to improve cloud infrastructure, including speeding up broadband deployments and moving to IPv6. Further, the government must ensure that education and training priorities align with the needs of a cloud workforce.

Poonen put this section into some special go-to-market context for us. “Governments need to get comfortable and understand the differences between CapEx (capital expenses) and OpEx (operational expenses), Poonen told IDN. “For the most part, cloud is a subscription model, not a capital investment model, so government CIOs need to be trained in these ways of budgeting and doing business, and get comfortable with them as a new way of procurement.” 

 
Transnational Data Flows — Because the cloud will be transnational, the U.S. should lead by example on how to encourage businesses and data flow across international borders. “The way to think about this is there are some generalized suggestions such as a framework for how to share data between the EU and the U.S.,” Poonen said.