Feds race to the cloud

Computerworld - The government sector is on a fast march to the cloud, but Robert Rosen wants to pause for a breath.

"I've been looking at the cloud for a long time, and it's not as simple as all the vendors want to make it seem," says Rosen, CIO of the National Institute of Arthritis, Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. "The federal government isn't this uniform user of IT. So there's no one-size-fits-all. There are places it fits fine, others where it doesn't, and this great middle area where it's 'maybe, maybe not.' "

So even though he's working under a new federal mandate known as "cloud first," Rosen is moving cautiously. He's evaluating how to use cloud computing to store data that his agency doesn't access frequently, a move that could help eliminate the need to build a new data center. But he says he wants to cover all bases to make sure he doesn't make mistakes. He's looking at the data itself to determine security needs. He's also calculating bandwidth requirements and devising an exit strategy in case he wants to switch vendors or move out of the cloud.

"It's a deliberate process we're going through. We're just not going to leap," says Rosen, a past president of the IBM user group Share. Still, the pressure is on Rosen and his colleagues to move to the cloud.

Last December, U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra established the "cloud first" policy, telling federal CIOs to move three services to the cloud within 12 to 18 months. In a 25-point plan to reform federal IT management, Kundra cited cost savings, flexibility and speed of deployment as reasons for adopting the policy.

Now IT leaders like Rosen are grappling with the nitty-gritty details involved in making the policy work, and gaining early successes moving some functions into the cloud as they work toward migrating truly strategic systems there as well.

"This is a paradigm shift, and that's a big change for private and government IT," says Shawn Kingsberry, CIO at the federal Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board and a proponent of cloud computing.

Kingsberry considers this a unique point in IT history, akin to the late 1990s, when IT departments went through drastic upgrades during the run-up to Y2K. Today, dwindling dollars and a shrinking workforce are forcing IT leaders to once again think big.

"Now you have a perfect situation where the stars are aligned to make massive change," he says. "When you look at what this means, federal government has the opportunity to make moves forward."