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The Economics of Federal Cloud Computing Analyzed
jg21 writes "With the federal government about to spend $20B on IT infrastructure, this highly analytical article by two Booz Allen Hamilton associates makes it clear that cloud computing has now received full executive backing and offers clear opportunities for agencies to significantly reduce their growing expenditures for data centers and IT hardware. From the article: 'A few agencies are already moving quickly to explore cloud computing solutions and are even redirecting existing funds to begin implementations... Agencies should identify the aspects of their current IT workload that can be transitioned to the cloud in the near term to yield "early wins" to help build momentum and support for the migration to cloud computing.'"
These government types always have their heads in the clouds...
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
$20B + system built by Microsoft's new 'Danger' arm + White House IT administration = dream government cloud!
All your base are most certainly permanently lost!
Cloud computing provides lower costs due to attaining economies of scale. The federal government certainly has scale to attain any efficiencies that a cloud operator might use to reduce the cost. It is scary to think the government will hand over data and processing to the cloud instead of providing a federally managed private cloud on a secure private network. This reeks of lobbying and special interests. Follow the money.
Moving onto clouds always gives me the sense of losing control.
With government agencies I am pretty sure my tax payment records will be the first they loose, my traffic offense records the last.
The concept of cloud computing is utilizing resources that are not located within one's general geographical area or the resources, at minimum, aren't owned by you, is that correct? If this is the case, how then would companies and people in general be persuaded to buy the hardware to run all of these resources? Or maybe what I'm asking is who is willing to pay for all of the cloud support? Does Microsoft say, for example, that the new Office 2012 is entirely cloud-based; no need for apps on your local machine, but they own the server farms to host all of the thousands of Office cloud apps that people are running? Maybe I'm confused.
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
This will be a feeding trough boondoggle for the big name, connected IT consulting companies. it will take forever, involve massive, cost overruns, and never work right.
So when will the IRS move my data into the "cloud"?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Something that isn't often mentioned when discussing cloud computing is a general problem with who has control over your data, where it resides, and what prevents others from accessing it. When you move to the cloud you need to be able to trust the service provider completely. This might not be a problem for unimportant things, but the government has privacy and secrecy obligations that it would not be able to fulfill by handing it sll over to a third party.
Booz Allen Hamilton is the consulting wing of the military-industrial-complex. Look at their members: Bushes, CIA/NSA directors, etc. This is the wing of the Republican party whose only problem with the size and scope of government is that it still has some semblance of democratic accountability, rather than having been farmed out to some shadow corporate control. The agenda is to centralize, nationalize, and privatize key US assets wherever possible. Information technology is becoming a crucial means of political control in the digital age. And clouds represent the perfect way to outsource and obfuscate that control, outside the reach of pesky freedom of information laws, of course losing any disparaging information in the process.
As an anecdote: Google opened a new datacenter near here recently. It has twice as many armed guards as IT staff. I would hate to be the one to have to serve a warrant on that place. Do you think that might be a convenient place to store your medical records, government or corporate e-mails, mortgage records for well-connected politicians, illegal spying programs, etc? What happens when the information you're looking for can't be tied to any one physical machine, or geographic location even?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I'm curious on how this will affect so-called "cyber attacks". Several governments have expressed the need to finance high-tech defenses against such attacks. By moving all their data to the cloud, would that not become a prime target? Clouds are not flawless, magical entities that will protect you from data loss and/or security breaches. In practice, they are just a bunch of (virtual) servers. With private servers you can physically disconnect them from outside access. But clouds are by definition hooked onto the internet, which allows anyone to access them.
Remember Carnivore? The FBI email filter that sniffed network traffic and kept copies of emails sent to a directed user? It fell afoul of privacy groups and was eventually withdrawn as it was effectively a form of warrantless wiretapping.
I wish I could find the source - but I remember it as C/Net or something like that. Anyway, the problem behind it's withdrawal wasn't that it was ineffective, (it was) nor was it that it picked up emails to people other than the intended recipient. (It didn't) The problem was that the carnivore system itself was insecure.
So the FBI would deploy this thing, essentially packet-sniffing an ISP's network, and then would be hacked by the Chinese or the Ruskies and all the information gathered by the FBI intelligence was then disclosed to the foreign powers. It was (apparently) an open Joke within the spy community.
Why does this somehow come to mind when I think of "Cloud computing" for the gubbmint? Because as bad as it is for the gubbmint getting a system to be secured, doing so with an outside 3rd party takes the problem to a whole new magnitude.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I think its best if each agency had its own servers that employees could access remotely. Data shouldn't be copied onto laptops which can then be lost. We won't have to worry about losing the data. The 3rd parties will probably sell it and be able to store it with other internal data like our phone records. I don't want the private sector having access to this any more than a person with a stolen laptop with social security numbers on it.
These government types always have their heads in the clouds...
....I thought that was CLOD computing. My Bad.
What is cloud computing? Knowledgeable people interviewed at Web 2.0 Expo last year describe in hilarious terms their understanding of the phrase, making only one thing clear: clouds are nebulous.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PNuQHUiV3Q
--Wendy
There needs to be real answers to real questions. How is cloud computing different from the fat servers and thin clients talked about in the old days? Will google allow self-provisioning of their apps to private clouds? Other company's and their web apps? Most cloud enthusiasts insist data is safe and secure on the internet, but there are many military / government orgs that must use detached, self provisioned, private clouds. Probably most major corporations will demand self-provisioned applications and data too. What no one appears to want any more is the data loss associated with fat client PCs and local hard drive applications/data. I don't think metered CPU/mem/apps/data on some supposed "secure internet" is going to work for everyone. I think people need to start thinking more about fat app/data services and thin clients on isolated intranets, perhaps using crypto VPNs to connect them, and less about global metered-use clouds on the internet.
The little red light on my scam-o-meter is blinking furiously.
Participatory Governance : The only feasible option for a real democracy, where everyone really does have a say.
I would need some pretty serious encryption and data retention policies before I put anything in the cloud. Why? when all I have is my resume and stuff I could care less about if people saw it? I want to dictate who sees my stuff and when. I hate it when people go behind my back, especially when I would provide it free anyway and with the track record of even some of the biggest companies I don't trust them at all. Besides privacy it is the principle.
Ummm... yeah.
So gov't worker A in an agency which name the worker cannot disclose has confidential files. He also has access to a cloud application for publishing, sharing purposes.
So, how do we safe guard uploading the sensitive document, accidentally of course, to a cloud application which is not locked down or has poor security?
This has already happened with regular application, but if the information is distributed across many servers possibly many organizations how do you plug the leak?
Previously there was only a single point of failure, now there is an unknown number of locations for the information leak.
You may as well post the document link on slashdot.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Cloud computing offers nothing. And by nothing I mean nothing new. Nor does it fix anything. The internet already works.
There, I said it.
For 99% of us, a web server does everything we need it to. Redundancy and fault tolerance are already very easy to buy in other forms that are perfectly reliable and non-invasive (RAID, adding servers for specific services, buying better hardware etc). These problems were solved long ago.
Yes, for the rare corporation that requires huge server clusters, cloudifying their infrastructure is the right direction to go. But that and buying a cloud are two completely different stories. If your server count is already that high, then you most likely already have the budget and the people to create your own cloud optimized for your specific needs, that works only for you.
Just like businesses love dedicated servers even when a shared server would do fine, businesses also love dedicated clouds.
Cloud providers need to think again about what and to whom they are selling. I see a market for super cheap hosting for the masses by selling competitive hosting packages by leveraging the cost efficiency and performance benefits of a cloud. I also see a market for dedicated custom cloud solutions for the high end market. However, both of these markets are extremely saturated, and if you are not selling anything new, you are primarily competing by price alone. Any such market is a lot of hard work for not so much money.
So good luck! PS. I am not buying.
Having read through this article server utilization is the most important factor driving better economics for the cloud :
"Our analysis assumes an average utilization rate of 12 percent of available CPU capacity in the SQ environment and 60 percent in the virtualized cloud scenarios."
(SQ means status quo, i.e., non-cloud.) This factor of 5 improvement in average utilization drives the overall cost savings and they are assuming a cloud overhead of about 45%. (I.e., if you look that their numbers, they assume that cloud CPU cycles cost 45% more than local cycles, but the efficiency is 5 times higher, for a overall cost reduction of a factor of 3.4 in the "public" cloud case, which has the largest savings.)
A factor of 5 in server utilization is huge; the question is, is it realistic ? Note that 60% usage corresponds to 100% usage for 14 hours per day, 7 days a week, or 20 hours of full usage for 5 days per week, and so would be quite high for a government web site. If government web servers dominate the cloud computing, the savings are likely not to be as large as this study supposes, because no amount of aggregation of government web site servers will get you much traffic in the middle of the night.
If you think about it, to be economically effective cloud computing (in the big picture) has to be about saving money by increasing average server utilization (averaged over all users). Cloud servers are not free, and require resources to service and maintain, and clouds have overhead. If some service is barely loading a single server, sure, I can see it being cheaper in the cloud. If servers are maxxed out almost all of the time, I bet that the cloud won't save much money. If the aggregate use is highly time variable, the cloud will not save as much money as a simple calculation would indicate, as the cloud will have servers sitting idle during off hours. For this particular article, its hard to say more as they don't reveal their actual data.
Here's a brown cloud. Compute that, motherfuckers!
1. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.computing.richard.stallman
2. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10367052-16.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5
And leave your backup disks in the alley at night. And outsource your IT to people you never meet.
That's pretty much what I think about "cloud computing".
I work for the government and there are two issues there. One is that we already have 3 initiatives in my 110,000 employee Department to consolidate into data centers. Unfortunately, these directives come from three different levels and mandate consolidation at 3 different centers (to be built).
That is the second issue. Saving money is not cost-effective in the Federal Government. Despite what they teach in civics class about the separation of powers, Congress approves each Department's budget along with line items for particular Agencies and Programs. They have their fingers dug deep into the process and if you can build a data center named for a congresscritter, then you will get funding for it whether it is ever used or not. In addition, you will get funding for the job you're actually supposed to perform so it is cost-effective for the Agency to pander to the politician.
OTOH, if you save money, it is merely removed from next year's budget since you obviously didn't need it.
Buy shares in Cirrus Logic.