Government IT to the cloud: private-sector lessons
January 19, 2011
With his “25-Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal Information Technology Management,” in December 2010, federal CIO Vivek Kundra sent shock waves through the IT world by announcing a “cloud-first” policy for the federal government.
Writing in clear, non-bureaucratic prose, Kundra showed that a new era is dawning in federal government IT.
Point No. 3 of the plan, the cloud-first policy, lays down the gauntlet immediately by comparing commercial and government IT in their ability to build applications that scale quickly. Demand for the 2009 “Cash for Clunkers” program quickly exceeded expectations, leading to unplanned outages and service disruptions within three days of the program’s launch. By contrast, Kundra describes how an unnamed “Web-based multimedia production company” was able to scale a video-sharing service from 50 to 4,000 virtual machines within the same period — three days — to meet demand that was tenfold what the company had anticipated.
Kundra’s implicit taunt — “the private sector can do it, so why can’t we?” — mirrors a typical sales approach used by commercial solutions providers, comparing consumer and enterprise services. The consumer Web, illustrated by the success of Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter and others, has raised users’ expectations, and those same users are now increasingly expecting a similar level of integration and performance in the computing services provided to them at work. In other words, “If our kids are enjoying such a great computing experience, why shouldn’t our customers and our constituents?"
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Implementing the cloud-first policy? Start with e-mail.
GSA takes the plunge, as first to move e-mail to cloud agencywide
Private-sector IT shops face many of the same cloud adoption barriers that government agencies face. Large companies are entrusted to secure data for millions of customers and have invested years in integrating systems internally and with commercial partners. System availability and performance are paramount; even a few minutes of downtime could translate to significant lost revenues or worse. In the short term, the risks of a dramatic shift in IT architecture may not seem worth the long-term benefits.