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Feds To Adopt 'Cloud First' IT Policy
theodp writes "The White House Thursday announced plans to restructure IT by consolidating federal government data centers and applications, and adopting a so-called 'cloud first' policy. Unveiled by federal CIO Vivek Kundra, the 25-Point Plan (PDF) calls for cutting 800+ data centers by 2015, as well as shifting work to cloud computing systems. The new 'Cloud First' policy cites the ability of Animoto.com to scale vs. the government's short-lived Cars.gov (Cash for Clunkers), although Google Trends suggests this may be somewhat of an apple-to-oranges comparison for justifying a national IT strategy. As long as we're talking clouds, a tag cloud of the 25-Point Plan underscores that the Feds are counting more on IT Program and Contract Management rather than Computer Science wizardry to deliver 'the productivity improvements that private industry has realized from IT.' Not to be a buzzkill, but those of you celebrating CS Education Week might be advised to consider an MBA if you want a Federal IT career."
it's too bad that the cloud doesn't even exist.
Oh, you meant servers, gotcha. Buzzwords get in the way from time to time, every time.
2nd post, yay!
If I'm a racist, I would say he's a perfect stereotype of Indian IT man specializing in hype and buzz.
We're moving this way in academia as well: it used to be that every research group doing anything of note with computers had to have its own servers, but the vast majority just sit idle all the time, and the maintenance overhead and potential for maintenance disruptions is very large (if your one main server has a hard drive failure, everything is on hold until you scramble to fix it). The trend has been to virtualize those, unless you're a research group with particularly high or specific computational needs, like doing cluster-computing or systems research.
The main open question is whether the virtualization will go mainly internally or externally. Should we just buy some EC2 instances from Amazon? Or should the department (or school, or university) maintain some compute resources that individual research groups can request virtual-machines on?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I heard some place called 'Wikileaks' was offering the government a good deal for cheap cloud hosting.
I welcome this move. Sure hope you have enough of an infrastructure to keep, say, taxpayer SSNs, DOBs, mother's maiden names out of the cloud, not to mention the inevitable access to this cloud resource by the SIPRnet.
It's a good time for government transparency, whether intentional or not.
Clouds don't leak right? I mean, there's no way any sensitive information could make its way out of there on some Root Access Inter-Node something.
I work as a federal contractor at a Department of Interior funded datacenter that is actually suppose to be taking on the 'work' from some of the downsized datacenters. Comical bit is, we've known about this for well over a year prior to TFA, and it's a total bean-counter move. The goal is "use less servers, and less operating systems". We still have zero idea what we are getting in, who we're getting it from, what it'll be, ect. To me, we're preparing more for straight P2V virtualization than we at all worried about some desk jockey's 'cloud' buzzword he put in his report.
Daily unique visitors: slashdot.com vs. cars.gov vs. animoto.com
Remote sites don't have a lot of bandwidth to do mass cloud and with only a few data centers all it takes is one back hoe to lead to a shut down while the cable is being fixed.
Management productivity improvements are a lot of BS that leads to alot paper work and people waiting a long just to get the tools to they need to do there job. Just what we need more MBA PHB's.
Some remote sites are on Satellite Internet that with FAP and high lag will suck when the on side data sever goes away.
Having a background in government, I can say, from their perspective, cloud services are a big win. It's not perfect, but it's a better deal than they get from any of their contract IT services.
Cloud services would have sunk NMCI before EDS sank the Navy. The billions the Navy spent on managed networks to get a desktop PC, email and productivity software was one of the biggest wastes of taxpayer money ever.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
We're moving this way in academia as well: it used to be that every research group doing anything of note with computers had to have its own servers, but the vast majority just sit idle all the time, and the maintenance overhead and potential for maintenance disruptions is very large (Altn fiyatlar ).
"Cloud" is just a way of saying you have a standardized, generic way of scaling your systems. The new buzzword adds an excuse to outsource the whole thing to a "reputable" supplier and avoid taking any responsibility. If your needs are small this is a great concept. You get to use the same iron as the big boys, without the up front investments.
For someone the size of the government however, I think it's rather strange they are not using clouds already. They may never have called them clouds, but surely they have some reasonable in-house systems architects, no?
as someone who's allergic to buzzwords - WTF is the difference between "cloud computer services" and "a VMWare instance on a suitably redundant infrastructure with a reputable hosting firm"?
This makes some sense if you're a relatively small company which could neither afford nor justify that sort of infrastructure for themselves. But the government?
So now we learn the real reason Jamie & Adam visited the White House recently...
>> 24 Launch “myth-busters” education campaign
SIGLOST && SIGUNUSED && SIGQUIT
Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.
And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.
My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.
"We can leak ourselves way better than any upstart Wikileaks wannabe, ha!"
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
We had just that setup in the 1960s and the 1970s at the universities I worked at. We called them "mainframes".
Then we spent most of the 1980s and 1990s trying to get rid of them, because highly centralized systems are often extremely expensive to build and maintain, and usually don't actually provide what each of the many users actually requires.
In terms of reliability, it's better for a single department or lab to be unable to get their work done due to software or hardware failure of some sort, rather than the entire campus being shit out of luck when the mainframe, err, "cloud", has issues.
You fools will spend the next decade getting this "cloud" bullshit put in place. Then around 2020 or so, you'll have had 10 years worth of problems. You'll then spend until 2030 trying to undo the mess. Sometime around 2040 you'll succeed, but by that time the current IT staff will have forgotten the problems that "cloud computing" caused between 2010 and 2020, and then by 2050 they'll be in the process of centralizing again...
that party owns your data.
Wait until Cheney puts the Energy Task Force papers on the cloud. Only then will you know it is secure.
Correction:
...call for cutting 800+ data centers by 2015 as well as shifting work to privately owned data centers.
If I hear someone talk about cloud computing again I think I’ll lose my lunch.
That said, Vivek Kundra is a fraud. Anything coming from his mouth is tainted. At the very least the guy lied on his resume about having a degree in biology, then all of a sudden his bio changed and he LOST the degree! Good thing there’s an internet archive!
Others agree:
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2009/08/12/special-report-is-us-chief-information-officer-cio-vivek-kundra-a-phony/
http://www.businessinsider.com/americas-cio-vivek-kundra-must-go-2009-3
http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/obamas-cio-vivek-kundra-previous-close-employees-arrested-fraud-bribery
http://tech.rightpundits.com/?p=36
Aerith second.
Cloud computing is a great idea for many situations - companies that want to focus on core capabilities and outsource support function, large companies that want to centralize services and control and I'm sure there are many others. For the government it is a much different story. First I want to say that this will most likely be an unmitigated success on paper - we will save billions of taxpayer dollars, increase security and bring peace to the known universe.
In reality it will be much like the centralization of other support services in the government, which has really cost us much more money and established small kingdoms that control the services that are squandered on unneeded efforts that help the support organization more than the actual internal customers. The people that really do the work and need to store their data will wait months and years to get the resources that they need and will actually be told what they need by PHBs in the central management kingdom. You have to realize, the US Federal government is a huge beast. This is not a tiny little country with a streamlined central government. Closely related entities such as the Army and Air Force have much different ways of doing things and many many meetings and working groups are needed just to get them to coordinate and standardize simple efforts. What works for the VA will not work for HUD will not work for the State Dept. will not work for the Navy as it stands. Whoever has the most influence in this cloud computing effort will force their way, this is how it always works.
Even if you do cloud computing within a given branch of the government such as the Army, the core competency units in the Army will be what drives the design of the data centers. The problem with this is the core competency in the Army is infantry and other fighting units. They are really limited users of data relative to other organizations within the Army such as the research and development community. The government generally focuses its big efforts on the 80% of the users, which is just common sense, and most of the other 20% realize this and just do for themselves. However, when you have this big directive from on high to migrate to "Cloud Computing" (a buzzword that will be implemented badly) these "other" units will not be able to do for themselves, they will have to listen to nonsense people talking about nonsense solutions to problems that they have never had to deal with - it happens all the fucking time. Most likely this migration will cost much more than expected as nearly 98% of all of these type of large migration projects do and money will be tight by the time that they get to the 20% of the users that aren't core, but have higher and more stringent data needs that the grunts at Ft. Hood. At that point, waivers will be signed and people will get back to work after a few years of fighting about nonsense, but in many places two or three systems will exist - the systems in the cloud that don't meet our needs, but we "have to use", the systems we actually use and were able to keep or stand up by finding a loophole in the system and the worst of the lot - the system that were stood up in secret because we can't live without them, but couldn't legally get them. This last class of systems are the ones that get compromised most often and actually are a big security risk and done improperly cost more to manage and power.
I do actually think that the "cloud computing" idea is great for the federal gov't. The problem is that the government is so mired in bureaucracy and rules for rules' sake that something so fluid and dynamic could never work it will be policied and regulated to death. The final nail in the coffin for this effort will be the fact that the best gov't employees are not the ones who understand new technologies and how they should be used, but the ones that can navigate the corridors of paperwork and nonsense regulations (bitter much? - I know I know) combined with the fact that the gov't generally want solutions that any ol' dumb-ass can use instead of hiring skilled and educated workers.
As the Federal CIO sang the praises of Amazon.com-backed Animoto's use of the Amazon Cloud, the Chairman of the Recovery Board decided giving Amazon the contract to host Recovery.gov was the right thing to do, and called on the public to 'imagine if other, much larger federal agencies were to follow our lead.'
Credit for deciding to tap Amazon was given to government contractor Smartronix, who reportedly used AWS in the development and testing of recovery.gov, but did not go live with it in the initial roll-out.
The government planned to find another home for the more than $1 million in computer hardware and software that were previously purchased to host the (apparently) relatively low-traffic Recovery.gov site, but were no longer needed after hosting was switched to Amazon.
This doesn't sound a like a good idea if you ask me.
http://saveie6.com/
Virginia consolidated all of its services into a single networked system and it's worked great for us!
So I'm sure the feds will have no problem deploying this to provide public services to its constituents. Of course, by "constituents" I mean "corporate donors" and "services" means "no-bid contracts". Regular citizens are just going to get screwed because it's not like they have any influence in the government.
Pointy haired Fed manager "Shift blame to the cloud as fast as possible as in cut our risk by 2015!"
Cloud epic phial.
Privatization of government, its resources, and its critical dependencies.
So rather than fix the issues of poor training (particularly of management within the ranks) and lazy HR approaches of least effort hiring that have plague federal IT staffing and self-management, they are going to out source it to privately owned and controlled cloud data centres.
If these data centres happen to be in China or India (or wherever), where the low cost of IT system and network administration labour makes their US based "front" company successful at placing a winning lowest bid, do you think the country and its economy are really going to benefit from unemployment of additional tens of thousands of middle class IT workers who currently work for the US government? To think nothing of the international economic espionage risks.
At face value it appears to be another example of no root cause analysis, being lazy in doing critical research on understanding the risks / rewards - and just believing the corporate white papers, and vendor-funded "independent" analyst reports.
Rather than go in and try to fix the problems in the existing data centres, which have been already paid for, they are going to scrape it and shift to third-party model on an optimistic schedule, self-congratulate themselves (federal CIOs) while finishing their final year before they retire to explore new career opportunities, which may or may not happen to include the vendors of those cloud services.
Same old story of government procurement being abused, just different industry buzzwords.
Once more, they (Microsoft) will replenish themselves. Cheat death again! The power of their source? The Crystal. Smart business move even if I hate em. Once again they will be completely irreplaceable.
I wish they would just adopt an "apply common sense policy first" policy
E Cumulonimbus Unum
My dad spent most of his career as a developer for a federal agency. He always lamented that the direction of the organization would change according to electoral results. Not so much because R's and D's disagree on how to run IT, but because a new regime means new appointees at the top. The tendency is for them to advocate for the latest and greatest (buzzword) so that they can show cool bullet-points for their bosses. In reality, the IT planning/testing/implementation cycle in a federal bureaucracy turns out to usually be longer than the election cycle so the impact is minimal. By the time it's conclusively proven that the .NET/Java/Oracle/Cloud solution does not work, there's a new boss in place and a new hype-cycle to chase.
Many custom applications are finicky about their environment, such as database, web server, and library version. You can't just slap them on a different generic box and have them work as-is. If the tuner is far away and detached, then they won't have any feel for a given application. You get a generic server monkey who has no knowledge or feel for YOUR shop's particulate application.
Sure, one could "fix" the problem by having more programmers and testers to make the apps more transferable, but that also has a cost associated with it; likely more than the savings of going with a generic cloud.
Clouds sound great on paper, but not always in practice. Maybe for file-only servers, it could work, but not applications.
Table-ized A.I.
Far cheaper to pwn the government in toto, as you'll be able to attack at points of intersection and consolidation rather than across thousands of servers spread throughout hundreds of buildings. And way cheaper to offshore the whole kit and kaboodle once the work of migrating to "the cloud" is done.
Yup...government is being run like a business: Zilch in the way of advantages to the American people or the nation other than cost.
They didn't learn squat from WikiLeaks.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
The characteristics of a cloud are not ideally suited to reliable data storage. Clouds are well known to be ephemeral and to change their size, shape and density according to the dictates of the local climate. Furthermore, clouds are much less substantial than they appear and can be blown away by the winds which spring up apparently at random - a whiff of senator's breath/wind can blow away a cloud. Clouds can evaporate and leave one defenseless in the glare of whatever it was that just zapped your cloud... Clouds are out of your control... Clouds do not have long life spans... Clouds become distorted and sometimes appear as fog.... We all know the fates of those with their heads in the clouds... So, don't say you were not warned!
sorry what are you smoking DEC owned that space in the 60s and 70's with the PDP range and the VAX took over in the Mid to late 80's
This is hilarious! The ban thumb drives in the military then start moving the gov't to the insecure cloud infrastructure. Good news for wikileaks, we'll be seeing a lot more leaks due to the lack of cloud security. HOORAY!!!
Having worked for the federal government, it sounds like managers are just trying to outsource the risk of IT failure, so it will not be their fault if something goes wrong (along with getting brownie points for having their "cloud" initiative adopted, thus maybe a fat paying job in private industry.) After all who gets noticed for just making the same old (constantly changing) systems work. Sorry for sounding cynical, but the how the system works.
Converting to a radical new architecture for critical applications almost never saves money. It is the cost of software development and maintenance that drives most system costs. Servers are almost free these days, they rarely account for more than 5-10% of overall system costs. But when you convert to a new and different architecture you have to re-write all that software, at ENORMOUS cost and considerable disruption to operations. And of course, you have to keep running the old systems while building the new ones, which will double or treble your IT costs for a year or two. And unlike the private sector, the government can't "pay for it out of the savings" because agencies can't borrow money and pay it back later - we are funded year by year by Congress. WHICH is the other major flaw in Mr. Kundra's pie-in-the-sky plan - with his severe ADHD he wasn't patient enough to coordinate this with Congress - so there's NO MONEY available to execute it. So like most OMB directives, agencies will drag their feet and delay about implementing this until there is a change in administration, then bury this idea on the trash heap of history where it belongs.