Government cloud delivery

At a high level, there are two basic ways government agencies can see benefit from cloud computing. The first way agencies can benefit from cloud is to use existing cloud services instead of building and running the components of those services themselves. The other way agencies can benefit from cloud is by using it as a tool to deliver services to customers. In the first case, government IT is a consumer of a cloud service.In the second, government IT is a cloud provider.

Remember, IT services are only needed because the mission or business requires a capability. We don’t have servers just to have servers. We have servers because we need to run apps. We have apps because we need to access, analyze and manipulate data to some end; forecast the weather, map the genome, find the terrorist. The data is what matters, not how it’s delivered.  

Just like with commercial organizations, when government IT is a consumer of cloud services, they benefit by not bearing all the costs and effort associated with building and maintaining a service. Think about all the things that go into an IT service. You need a facility, servers, networks, storage, cooling, power, backup, load balancing, security. The list, just of things you have buy to get started, goes on and on,. In addition to the start up expenditure of buying facilities, equipment and software for an environment, the costs can be huge to actually implement something complex like email or a server virtualization infrastructure once you have all the parts, even if you have sufficient well-trained staff. If you don’t have the staff it can really get ugly because you have to pay an external entity to build and maintain the system.

There are always trade-offs, but cloud can make much of this pain disappear. Most public cloud service providers are all about specialization and scale. When you do one thing, you can do it very well. When you have fewer processes you can afford to optimize and automate those processes. When you buy 5,000 servers a month, you get them cheaper than someone who buys 100 a year. Many agencies today are asking themselves, “Why should I own this?”. IT is not a core competency at many government agencies and why should it be? We want the IRS to quickly process returns, the Air Force to deliver ordnance to the right targets, and NOAA to keep feeding accurate data to weather.com. Should they be sweating the details of procuring and optimizing discrete components of their system like virtualization platforms, testing systems, etc.?

In the next post in this series, I will discuss why some agencies do need to worry about owning the service and need to build it “behind the fence”. Cloud can still provide a lot of value in this scenario. As provider of cloud-based services government IT can drive down their own costs, through standardization, virtualization, and automation of their platforms and offerings while increasing customer satisfaction and time to market with new capabilities. This is usually called “private cloud” or “community cloud” and it can be built on or off premises. The key characteristic is that it is a dedicated environment.

Overview of how government leverages cloud computing solutions

Cloud means many things to many people, especially in government. It can be a confusing topic for government IT leaders, procurement people, and the vendors and integrators who are responding to government requirements. This article is the first in a series on how government is using the cloud today and some thoughts on how things might work better.

First, let’s quickly talk about what cloud is. Cloud computing is all about making IT better. The end game is to make IT invisible, like electricity. You don’t think about how power gets into your home so you can charge your phone. As a matter of fact, you probably don’t even worry about being home to charge your phone. The plug in your office or hotel room is guaranteed to work. Cloud computing works the same way. Cloud makes the multitude of components powering the services, apps and entertainment we depend on, work invisibly. Cloud is what’s behind the easy button. It’s software, hardware, and smart folks stitching things together.

Cloud computing changes how businesses see IT because now they don’t have to own and maintain all the moving parts. Organizations can now replace components like databases, servers, storage and lots of software tools with a black box. This is great because the care and feeding of the IT food chain gets exponentially harder as complexity increases and harder almost always means slower and more expensive. Cloud services are a no-brainer for most companies today just like they are for you and I. Would you ever consider running an email server in your basement to get your mother-in-law setup on email? Could you build and maintain a service like Dropbox in your basement (or in the lab at work) that let you store, access share documents with anyone, anywhere? Even if you could, should you?

The world of government IT is a little different though. Bureaucracy, regulation, funding, security requirements and many other issues conspire to make IT in government hard. Anything new needs more than a business case to be adopted. It must be tested, documented, added to the approved products list, and procured according to a very complex set of rules that were probably written before cloud even existed as a concept. Add on the reality that government agencies are often running critical IT services at disaster sites or in deserts, jungles, ships or aircraft, sometimes with unfriendly forces doing everything thing they can to hinder the mission. It’s a unique challenge, but one that can benefit from the simplicity and ubiquity cloud can bring to IT services if government can figure out how to safely and efficiently use cloud services.

In follow-on posts, I’ll discuss the types of cloud services the government is using and describe some of the delivery mechanisms for cloud.