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."

Comments

not a terrible idea

[Trepidity]

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?

Re:So sad

[squiggleslash]

It means third party, Internet connected, managed services.

For example, a company that offers network connected scalable processing and bandwidth services is offering "cloud" services.

Like Amazon.com, for example. Amazon.com offers this as one of their services. They used to sell this service to some-one called "Wikileaks".

Interesting fact: Amazon stopped selling those services to Wikileaks, and lied about why. Amazon claimed they were suspending the hosting because Wikileaks had published 250,000 embassy cables without vetting them first. But this was untrue. Questions have been asked as to why Amazon.com did this, and Amazon.com claimed this false smear in order to deflect the allegation that they had done so under government pressure, something they denied in the same press release.

Now the Feds are announcing a massive move over to cloud computing, a move that will result in hundreds of millions of dollars to those companies who get the contracts.

I wonder why Amazon.com dropped Wikileaks as a customer. And why they felt the need to lie about why. And why they did this just before hundreds of millions of dollars became available for services like the ones they offer, from an organization that really doesn't like Wikileaks.

Big buzzkill, over-dramatized

[adosch]

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.

Remote sites don't have a lot of bandwidth to

[Joe The Dragon]

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.

Re:As a fan of WikiLeaks...

[Anonymous Coward]

agreed. congress is going to step into siprnet too.
http://whatsbrewin.nextgov.com/2010/05/hill_wants_access_to_secret_siprnet.php
its time for more transparency with more people having access to siprnet and cloud based infrastructure supporting public information access to government stored data.

Vivek Kundra is a fraud

[Coolhand2120]

...calls for cutting 800+ data centers by 2015, as well as shifting work to cloud computing systems.

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:

But his degree in biology has yet to appear as his record shows a degree from College Park Campus for Psychology and nothing more.

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

Re:Clouds don't leak right?

[PhrostyMcByte]

There is less surface area to cover, and the architecture has potential to be more standardized. I'd say it will probably be easier to maintain security with a few big clouds than with 800 random smaller datacenters. (Note, nothing says they need to use Amazon or Microsoft's cloud -- they can make their own.)

Re:What cloud?

[EaglesNest]

I am a reasonable, in-house system architect for a major federal agency. Yes, we use virtual servers for most of our applications. This doesn't reduce the number of operating systems that we have, but it certain reduces the number of physical servers and disk arrays that we have to maintain. It's a scalable environment and allows for redundancy between data centers. Most of our users who access our systems are scattered nationwide, so network outages either affect only them, or must be so severe that they take down mutiple data centers each with multiple ISP connections, power sources and HVAC. I supposed that you could call this operating our own "cloud." I don't really care what you call it. I believe it's the among the most efficient and effective solutions for our needs, but doesn't hold us hostage to any one service provider. During out last phase of the migration to our current architecture, our P2V process was straightforward and comfortable. The tools are robust and mature.

If you are thinking of replacing physical servers with virtual or a "cloud," please either build the cloud yourself, or encrypt at the LUN or virtual disk level. For God's sake don't allow any data at rest or in transit to reside or cross over networks owned by third-parties, contractors, etc.

BTW, yes, an MBA or MPP or even PMP probably would go father to get to up to the higher grades in federal public service than a computer science degree. Then again, a CCIE wouldn't hurt either.