CIO - The federal government may not be renowned for its operational speed or agility, and certainly IT is no exception, but federal agency CIOs and their employees have gradually been warming to the new model of cloud computing, according to a panel of industry executives speaking at a conference here on Wednesday.
"We've seen movement both in private cloud and public cloud," says Susie Adams, chief technology officer for Microsoft's federal business.
Adams and others noted that government clients are increasingly looking to commercial cloud services both for infrastructure functions like computing power and storage, and applications such as email and collaboration or CRM-like tools to deliver better citizen services.
In part, that gradual shift has come at the direction of the White House, which has instructed all agencies to prioritize cloud applications and services ahead of traditional technologies when they are considering new IT projects.
The so-called cloud first policy comes alongside other initiatives to develop standards for cloud computing, formulate policies for deploying mobile technologies, and efforts to address security concerns associated with the cloud, among other programs.
But the panelists at the FedScoop cloud and cybersecurity conference also suggested that federal CIOs have been welcoming cloud services and apps behind their agency firewalls for many of the same reasons that have motivated their counterparts in the private sector to embrace the technologyAAcost savings, operational efficiencies and greater flexibility chief among them.
"What we're seeing emerging ... is in the infrastructure space [and] it's white hot," says Cameron Chehreh, chief enterprise engineer at General Dynamics Information Technology. "So everyone wants to get the layer of abstraction above virtualization," he adds.
"They want the self-service, they want the rapid provisioning more because IT traditionally has had the bad rap of it takes a long time to get capability and support of a mission. That's now changing. And culturally I've seen IT departments that were traditionally a little bit more stoic becoming much more responsive and agile in their approach from an infrastructure perspective," Chehreh says.
Chehreh and speakers acknowledged that the cultural attitudes of IT workers can vary widely across the various civilian and defense agencies, just as some datasets and applications are suited for a public cloud, while others, such as classified military information, are not considered candidates for any type of cloud deployment.
But opinions within government are shifting, and it is telling that the panelists cited procedural factors like the minutia of the procurement process as the biggest impediments to federal adoption of cloud technologies, rather than more familiar concerns such as security.
This IT pilot fish at a government agency gets a call from the administrative officer, who's on the verge of hysterics: Her computer is dead, she's having a total meltdown, and it's all his fault.
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