Agencies using cloud to de-clutter IT systems

Richard Spires wants the Homeland Security Department to follow the minimalist approach when it comes to its back-office technology.

Spires, the DHS chief information officer, said the set up now — mostly a client-server approach — leads to too much clutter.

Instead, Spires said DHS wants to make services, such as storage, computing power, email and collaboration — that take up servers, personnel time and resources — more like a utility in the cloud.

“Cloud will continue to start to take on business processes in the near term, probably four or five years, before we start to really see it take off,” Spires said Wednesday during a panel presentation at the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Cloud Computing Forum in Gaithersburg, Md. “For now, it’s buying that utility through the middleware layer because I want all of my people focused on that customer, working with that customer, better understanding their objectives, their capability needs and how we will build IT systems on top of that stack in order to meet those needs. That’s the value of an IT organization, particularly in the kind of department I’m in. We don’t do nearly enough of that. I think we are clearing away a lot of this clutter and that is why I think it will change so rapidly.”

The idea of using IT to meet mission needs is far from new. Every time the government has moved into emerging technology, the call came for using IT to meet the mission.

But Spires and other say this is different because of the impending budget cuts every agency is facing in 2012 and beyond.

For example, the Office of Management and Budget wants agencies to find ways to spend less on acquisition and on back-office systems.

Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel detailed his new “share-first” policy, where agencies must look to see what technology already is available before buying new.

VanRoekel, who also spoke at NIST Wednesday, said cloud technology is at an inflection point to answer a call, in this case for agencies to do more with less.

VanRoekel defined four key areas of cloud to get to that end state of reduced IT clutter.

• Agencies. “We want to ensure they have all the right tools (that are) necessary and resources to migrate to the cloud,” VanRoekel said. The CIO Council is working on a white paper and best practices to show how agencies are using cloud, which will focus on things such as Freedom of Information Act requests, privacy, e-discovery and other considerations, he said. “We want to bring them into the conversation early so they are not after-thought conversations.”
• Procurement. He said the cloud cybersecurity initiative, called FedRAMP, is the key piece to this focus area. VanRoekel said the standards and memo are in final review at OMB. Over time, OMB will make it mandatory for agencies to buy only those cloud services that have gone through the FedRAMP process.
• International considerations. This includes challenges such as jurisdiction, security of data in transit, traceability, service-level agreements, codes of conduct and consideration of local laws. “Our goal here is to carefully strike the balance between trade considerations, cybersecurity implications and really our innovation agenda,” he said.
• Cybersecurity. This is the most important area, and agencies cannot afford to make the trade-off between security and innovation, VanRoekel said. Moving data and applications to the cloud can make systems more secure in the cloud, he added.

“We also are very much focused on people,” he said. “What we’ve noticed in looking at cloud deployments in agencies — it’s very much a multi-disciplinary consideration. It’s not just the CIO or technical people involved. The job of the CIO is to bridge or be that universal translator between the business and technology needs and implementation.”

Even as OMB and the CIO Council continue to work through several of these issues, agencies are moving quickly into the cloud.

Public and private clouds

DHS, for instance, already is using a private cloud for its sensitive data and a public cloud for non-sensitive data.

Keith Trippie, the DHS executive director of enterprise system development, said there are about 10 to 12 areas the agency is moving or wants to move to the cloud.

Trippie said DHS wants to make it easy for employees to access data and applications anywhere, anytime.

“Most of the department is out there and is mobile,” he said. “They are not necessarily inside the Beltway so we have to provide better services to them.”

DHS awarded two task orders to HP and CSC to provide

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