Page 10 - FCW, April 2017

CAPITALIZING ON THE CLOUD
THE NEXT ERA OF THE CLOUD
Following the “Cloud First” mandate, government agencies now consider cloud Bsolutions an integral aspect of their operations.
Y ALL ACCOUNTS, the “Cloud First” era is coming In a similar vein, success of the Defense Department’s
to a close. Agencies are preparing to make cloud milCloud project, an on-premises cloud solution managed by solutions an integral part of their operations going the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), has already forward. The federal government’s “Cloud First” prompted DOD to begin planning for milCloud 2.0 as a next policy, issued in Dec. 2010, went a long way toward generation cost-saver.
helping agencies understand the potential benefits of cloud. The 2.0 platform will offer both on-premises and off-
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Now the challenge is to build on that work and develop a
more strategic approach that realizes the cloud’s full potential.
The impetus for doing so is clear. Across the public
sector, agencies are under pressure to modernize their IT infrastructure as a way to reduce costs, improve security, and deliver a higher caliber of IT services—and cloud computing is expected to be a vital element of these modernization efforts. According to a recent study by Forrester Research, cloud is set to become “the dominant technology model” in the private sector by 2020, with estimated revenues of $236 billion.
Government agencies might not adopt cloud at quite
the same rate, but the trend is the same. Across the board, agencies are expected to expand their existing cloud solutions and make cloud the de facto platform for new applications.
In fiscal 2016, 8.5 percent of all IT spending in the federal government involved the cloud, according to a report
by industry researcher IDC.
Squeezing Savings From the Cloud
For many agencies, the potential for cost-savings continues to be the major driver for cloud adoption. The Department of Agriculture has been particularly efficient in extracting savings from the cloud, according to IDC, which points to a 30 percent savings in 2011 when the U.S. Forest Service migrated to a new cloud-based system.
How did the agency achieve such whopping results? Part of its technique is a new cloud-based management platform equipped with transparency—and a dashboard view into all network and telecommunications services and assets. The agency is now able to determine how its resources are being used in more than 6,000 locations through an automated process that helps to eliminate human error and cuts staff time spent on menial tasks, such as invoice processing.
“Soon all 29 agencies within the USDA migrated to this platform—and the real savings in employee time and money— continued to scale at that 30 percent rate, representing millions of taxpayer dollars annually,” IDC reports.
premises capabilities to generate significant savings to the Pentagon, says DISA cloud portfolio chief John Hale.
Like its civilian counterparts in the Agriculture Department, milCloud 2.0’s appeal will be based on its ability to lower costs, a significant factor in an era of sequestration, says Hale, speaking at an AFCEA meeting last summer. “By leveraging cloud capability—both commercial on-premises and off-premises—we can bring significant savings to the department,” he says.
Even so, the platform has limitations. “There’s always going to be the need for traditional hosting in a DOD data center,” says Hale, who added that certain workloads, such as nuclear command and control, “just do not fit well in a virtualized or cloud model.”
The bullish outlook for cloud suggests a similar expansion of cloud security activities. In the federal government,
the focus is on building support for the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP). As part
of that, the FedRAMP office began clearing cloud vendors to host high-impact systems, which expands the potential market for commercial cloud services considerably.
The program office also upgraded its marketplace dashboard to make it easier for agencies to connect with cloud service providers and third-party assessment organizations.
Prepping for Shared Cloud Services
The General Services Administration’s new shared services framework—the “Federal Integrated Business Framework”— takes an innovative approach to shared services that could significantly expand the uses of cloud across the federal government.
The framework, announced in October 2016, is intended to document the functional business capabilities expected in each line of business across government and how those areas intersect, which sets the stage for buying SaaS solutions that could lower the cost of delivering administrative services.
In January, GSA’s Unified Shared Services Management
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