The Future of Government IT

Written by
Padmasree Warrior

"Whether we like it or not, we live in interesting times!"

That quote from Robert Kennedy seems to resonate more than ever, especially in the world of government technology. For government IT teams, this is a time of significant opportunity coupled with enormous challenges. On the one hand, there's a renewed sense that government technology and innovation will have a positive impact. Citizens have high expectations and are looking for new ways to engage and participate. At the same time, we will remember this period in our history as a time of fiscal crises and global uncertainty. Government IT decision-makers must work against a backdrop of economic turbulence and intense pressure to control costs.

Government CIOs in particular are being asked to maintain a delicate balancing act. For example, how do you balance the public's demand for fast, transparent access to information versus the need for robust security and privacy? The need to streamline internal agency operations versus the mandate to collaborate and share data across multiple agencies? The drive to provide new services versus the need to reduce IT spending?

Here's the ray of light that I find most encouraging: We have an opportunity to work together across the public and private sectors to rewrite the next chapter — as one of technological leadership and global advancement

I shared this perspective recently at the Enterprise Architecture 2009 event in Washington, D.C.

When you consider both the promise and the inherent challenges in government IT, there's no question that cloud computing has a central role to play going forward. But why cloud?

In its simplest form, cloud computing is when IT resources and services are abstracted from the underlying infrastructure and provided "on demand" and "at scale" in a multi-tenant environment. If you think about it, cloud computing is the most network-centric computing architecture ever, in that it relies on the network to deliver IT value and functionality.

In our ongoing discussions with government CIOs, flexibility is the biggest advantage they see in moving to the cloud model. Cloud computing promises to enable a new level of elasticity in IT via on-demand resource allocation and dynamic provisioning — not to mention faster application deployment. Cost is the other big advantage with cloud computing, especially the opportunity to reduce spending since you are essentially outsourcing IT hardware to the cloud.

But if you're managing IT for a government agency, there are some significant limitations relative to the cloud model that must be addressed. Perhaps most important, we must develop a trusted approach to cloud computing. Without trust, the economics and increased flexibility enabled by the cloud make little difference. Trust in cloud computing centers on four core concepts ― these are the challenges that keep government IT people up at night and these are the areas that we are working to address with our partners:

• Security - Traditional issues around data and resource access control, encryption and incident detection
• Control - The ability of the agency to directly manage how and where data and software is deployed, used and destroyed
• Service-Level Management - The definition, contracting and enforcement of service level agreements among a variety of parties involved
• Compliance - Conformance with required regulatory, legal and other government requirements.