Taming the wild west of cloud acquisition
August 26, 2014
Grazed from FCW. Author: Kymm McCabe.
For acquisition professionals, buying cloud computing is a bit like stepping from a 21st-century city into the Wild West. Federal buyers must move from the known, predictable, more or less standard procurement world into one that is unknown, unfamiliar and as yet untamed. It’s no wonder that in ASI Government’s polls of acquisition professionals at 110 federal organizations, 64 percent of respondents believe they lack the necessary technical expertise in cloud computing and thus are challenged in structuring contracts for it.
"There’s no exact fit for commercial cloud in the [Federal Acquisition Regulation]," Mark Day, deputy assistant commissioner of the General Services Administration’s Office of Integrated Technology Services, told attendees at a March conference on cloud acquisition. Agencies that have acquired cloud services have done so in different ways, and only with time will it become clear which approaches work best, said Michael McFarland, director of GSA’s Office of Acquisition Operations…
"When the auditors weigh in, we’ll see what works," he added…
Read more from the source @ http://fcw.com/articles/2014/08/26/acquisition-matters-cloud.aspx