Page 60 - FCW, October 2017

FCWPerspectives
Cloud: Getting beyond
the cost conversation
In a wide-ranging roundtable discussion, agency executives were unanimous on one point: Cloud strategies must be about more than ROI
When FCW convened cloud leaders from across the government on Aug. 23, their opinions varied when it
came to security, government/ industry relationships and
the best ways to approach migrations from traditional data centers to the cloud. However, there was one area of overwhelming consensus: The savings-driven sales pitch that has dominated the conversation since “cloud first” became official policy misses the bigger picture, and in some ways, it is hindering the government’s ability to take full advantage of cloud services.
The discussion was on the record but not for individual attribution (see Page 43 for a list of participants), and the quotes have been edited for length and clarity. Here’s what the group had to say.
Stop talking about cost savings
Cloud services can certainly cost less than legacy data centers, the partici- pants said, but migrations cost real and identifiable money, and the saving can be hard to quantify.
“I think cloud was sold wrong, to be honest, when it first came out,” one CIO said. Although the sales pitch was all about saving money, “it changes the proposition from being some cost over time to maintain a system that you put in place versus...operational cost.”
That budget flexibility, along with other benefits, is far more important than the exact cost per server hour, several participants said. One went so far as to argue that the balance sheet- focused, return-on-investment mindset does not even make sense for a federal agency.
“That’s not what we’re here for,” the executive said. “We’re here for provid- ing service to the American public. That is what we should be talking about. I think the idea of going to the cloud is really about how do we most effective- ly get technological services deployed, which actually should be needed to solve the problems that should be solved. That’s the way to sell it.”
Security: Cloud can (mostly) do it better
Participants also took issue with long- standing objections that cloud services
are not secure enough for sensitive government work. Many agency offi- cials have come around to the view that the cloud can offer comparable security to legacy on-premises sys- tems, but few fully appreciate how much more secure and resilient a cloud service can be.
That perception is largely due to scale and staffing. “I like the cloud because it gives me architectural agility so that if we need to change, we can,” one executive said. “But I also believe that my cloud service provider is hiring people I couldn’t possibly hire with the salaries they can pay.”
Another recalled an independent assessment of his agency’s in-house security operations, which “found that our own security teams weren’t actually doing what they were sign- ing off on.”
“I have no doubt \[the Defense Department\] can do it on their own,” that executive said, but for smaller agencies, relying on cloud service providers results in far better visibil- ity into “what’s going on outside our network, what’s talking back, what’s calling home and what’s coming in that needs to be stopped than if we did it ourselves.”
Other participants argued that cloud security is that happy rarity where mar- ket incentives align almost perfectly with government needs. “The conse-
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October 2017 FCW.COM