Government Community Cloud – Best practices

Grazed from Cloud Computing Best Practices.  Author: Neil McEvoy.

The Community Cloud is one of the NIST Deployment Models, and is critical to the adoption of Cloud Computing, as it finds the balance between addressing customers data privacy concerns and leveraging Cloud-enabled economies of scale.

Government isn’t the only sector that can utilize this approach, for example here is the finance sector doing so for a ‘trading cloud’, but it does provide a very clear explanation of the problem statement that Cloud is addressing.

Principally this is to achieve more “joined up working” across different government departments, at different levels of IT strategy.

Problem statement

The first painful irony to understand is that the fragmentation that needs joined up is actually man-made.

Like most large organizations Governments are organized hierarchically, with different departments for each of their main functions, like Education, Welfare, Tourism and so on, and the head of each department, ie. the Deputy Minister, is directly responsible for the privacy and security controls of the information they process.

This means that typically each operates as a ringfenced ‘fiefdom’, because the simplest and most absolute method of achieving this information security is simply to purchase and operate your own IT estate: You buy your own servers and business applications and keep them entirely seperate from any others.

Yes this does provide the means for the Minister to ensure their data privacy compliance, but it comes at a very high price – For the taxpayer.

This provides a local solution to their own needs but creates two key global issues: 1) A huge amount of under-utilized IT server hardware, meaning highly inefficient use of taxpayers monies, and 2) a lack of ‘joined up working’ across agencies, resulting in poor customer service for citizens.

Under-utilization expense –

The current TCO of one cabinet of servers includes $200k capital cost and another $200k in operating costs for cooling and HR. Considering utilization rates can be as low as 5-15% that’s over $300k in wasted monies, per rack.

In Canada the Federal Government operates over 120 data-centres, and in the USA over 1,000, meaning thousands of racks, so it’s not difficult to start seeing there is tens and hundreds of millions of dollars being wasted on unused servers.

Multiple layers of Government –

There is further fracturing because most governments are then further delineated by Municipal, Provincial and Federal levels of bureaucracy. Each then operates its own data-centres, IT organizations, …. etc., multiplying this cost another magnitude.

And because there are hundreds of different business applications being used in this mix, it means each of these is also using it’s own set of customer identity data. Citizen information is duplicated thousands of times creating yet more cost-inducing complexity.

Citizens have to remember multiple usernames and passwords for each department they interact with, and needlessly repeat the associated forms process for each workflow they use. This drives up costs significantly, as well as meaning agencies do not effectively share data.

Solution – Community Cloud architecture

Cloud Computing is such a powerful trend because it offers practical ways for addressing both of these issues.

Best Practices in Government Cloud Computing will address these issues through:

• Community Clouds – Clusters of related agencies, like Healthcare value chains, will aggregate their infrastructure needs to achieve more efficient cost profiles for their applications.
• Cloud Identity – Citizen-centric federated Identity systems so that applications share a common understanding of who users are and what they’re permitted to see and access.
• Cloud SOA – Leverage this single Identity metasystem for more effective use of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) integration between systems.
• Private Inter-Cloud Markets – Leveraging advances in public Cloud Computing markets and deploying the brokering software internally to harness under-utilized server capacity into private Clouds.

Virtualization technologies have now matured such that multiple departments can securely share infrastructure, and as part of this consolidation applications can be better designed to utilize shared service components within the environment, for example a ‘Citizen SSO’ – Single sign-on.

Government IT teams can now collaborate with their colleagues in other areas of government to better share infrastructure to reduce costs, and as part of doing so they can better integrate their applications so that the customer experience is much more streamlined.