Agencies to justify not using cloud computing to OMB

The Office of Management and Budget will require agencies to develop an alternative analysis discussing how they could use cloud computing for all major technology projects for the fiscal 2012 budget.

Agencies will be expected to tell OMB why they wouldn't use cloud computing for these initiatives, according to the 2011 budget passback language obtained by FederalNewsRadio.

And in 2013, agencies must give OMB a complete alternatives analysis for mixed life cycle projects where agencies are spending new money-known as development, modernization and enhancement-and steady state or operations and maintenance funding for how they could move to cloud computing, the budget instructions say.

This language is on top of the plan by OMB to require agencies launch a series of cloud computing pilots across the government in 2010 using the E-Government Fund. In the Financial Services bill, the House's version includes $33 million for the General Services Administration, which manages the fund for OMB. The Senate's version includes $35 million.

Congress has yet to finalize the bill, but OMB will receive more money for e-government than ever before.

Senate lawmakers write in the committee report that $15 million should be used for "improving innovation, efficiency and effectiveness in federal IT, including an initiative on optimizing common services and solutions/cloud computing. This initiative would provide for pilots to identify enterprisewide common solutions to eliminate duplication at the agency level and lower the total cost of federal IT infrastructure. Of this $15 million, the Committee is including $7.5 million for the Center for IT Excellence proposed by GSA. The center will deploy a selected set of infrastructure services, cloud based applications, offer Infrastructure as a service to agencies, and provide portal government applications."

All of these new requirements around cloud computing come as agencies are trying to understand how to make this technology work.

Several agencies are moving into the cloud slowly. NASA, for one, launched its Nebula cloud environment. The Defense Information Systems Agency has continued to expand its Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE) and Forge.mil platforms.

The Agriculture Department's National Finance Center and the Interior Department's National Business Center also are looking how cloud computing could help them deliver their human resources and financial management services better.

"Looking at the budget and guidance we get with the budget, we are seeing specific references to cloud computing and this has never happened before," says Chris Kemp, NASA Ames chief information officer, Wednesday speaking at the Digital Government Institute's cloud computing conference in Washington. "I think that we are finally recognizing that taking this step and doing pilot projects is going to be critical in focusing federal resources in the right place, on solving problems for the customers and the public, and not on infrastructure."

Kemp says NASA is trying to make it easier for agencies to use Nebula. He says NASA will put the platform in the Apps.gov storefront in early 2010 so agencies can use a government credit card and provision space on the platform.

"We will release a white paper to tell agencies how to take the Nebula platform and implement it in their own hardware and play around with it," he says. "We have an open source agreement and an open source contributor agreement. It allows us to take code written by the community and reincorporate it back into the project so we can re-release the code."

So as agencies add code to Nebula to solve problems, NASA can review and selectively reintroduce the code back into the platform.

"I liken Nebula to Linux," Kemp says. ."Nebula to the data center is what Linux is to the personal computer. We are trying to have integrated set of open source technologies to have a full self-service platform. I hope agencies take it and have fun with it and hopefully contribute code back to the branch."

Kemp also plans to release NASA's business model for Nebula, including how much money is spent on research and development, hardware and software.

"We will provide visibility into the entire eco-system," he says. "The government in order to adopt cloud computing quickly and take advantage of these opportunities needs to be a smart buyer and understand the technology. The biggest challenge at NASA is not the technology, it's the 50,000 people that need to know how to deploy, procure and implement processes and standards around the technology."

Kemp says NASA will launch several pilots in 2010 using Nebula, including hosting version 2 of USASpending.gov. Kemp says he is unsure when OMB will "flip the switch" on version 2 of USASpending.gov.

NASA also will put the Mars data set on Nebula and release it through the Microsoft World Wide Telescope project, and use the Google Earth technology to let anyone look at Mars the same way users look at Earth.

DISA, meanwhile, in early 2010 will open RACE to its classified network-NIPRnet.

Henry Sienkiewicz, DISA's technical program director for the computer services division, says RACE already has 3,000 users and a few hundred projects, and the agency is starting to see results.

"Other organizations are contributing code into the same repository," he says. "It's been a great approach. This is a great example for other software development, especially inside the government space. This is a great model to use for other organizations."

Sienkiewicz says DISA is working with parts of the Army and parts of the Air Force to host commercial customer relationship management applications in the agency's cloud. He adds that DISA is discussing moving at least some of the Microsoft Office suite to the data center and out of each user's desktop or laptop computer.

DISA also is considering a pilot to see how they could provision resources, such as bandwidth, dynamically in the data center.

Sienkiewicz says the goal for all of this is to virtualize at least 50 percent of its environment, and reduce the time it takes to take an application from an idea to production to about a week, including the certification and accreditation process.

For more coverage of cloud computing and the federal government, see the Fed Cloud Blog on FederalNewsRadio.com.

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