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October 2017 FCW.COM
A data center “has no inherent value to the citizen,” the executive added, “so why are we doing it when there’s a model that’s better?”
Dedicated government data centers made sense at one time, another noted. From the 1960s until fairly recently, he said, “what the government wanted did not necessarily exist in a commercial sector. There are still some things that we have to do, but I think the time has passed for us to build and run our own data centers.”
Others said that industry cloud ser- vices can bring scale and intellectual capital with which agencies simply cannot compete. Even the intelligence community is struggling to attract the talent needed for artificial intelligence work, one participant said. The only practical way to get the necessary machine learning algorithms might be to buy them via cloud platform solu- tions, he added.
Yet although no one at the table argued that basic storage and com- puting power were inherently govern- mental functions, several rejected the all-or-nothing approach.
“If it is core to what your agency does, do it in-house,” one said. “You get no credit for buying a data center or for running a perfect platform. You do get credit for doing your mission correctly. If cloud-powered machine
learning is something that is going to address your mission, do that in-house. These are domain-specific things.”
Another participant said the best approach might be to focus on build- ing in-house expertise at the policy and program management levels.
“You need to have enough tech- nical expertise to oversee what the contractors are doing,” the official said, before again stressing that the emphasis should be on the mission- specific aspects. “For machine learn- ing, I would love to have people on staff who understand the data enough to apply it to the algorithm but who are not doing the guaranteeing of the servers to have elasticity to do the processing.”
“So much of this exists already in the public domain,” another official said. “As a contractor makes this a case to deliver, we can actually worry about the important stuff, which is the mission itself.”
Is SaaS the answer?
Although the security concerns for today’s SaaS offerings are significant, most roundtable participants agreed that big cloud benefits will come as agencies move beyond basic infra- structure to SaaS and platform-as-a- service solutions.
The shared-services possibilities are
too tantalizing to ignore, they said. One participant cited human resource sys- tems and desktop-as-a-service as the two low-hanging fruits that should be aggressively pursued as government- wide offerings.
“DOD alone, back in 2015, was spending $11.5 billion on just HR IT,” the official said. “It’s a big problem, but I’m pretty sure we could do it for less than $11.5 billion for the entire government.”
“We recognize that not everybody’s the same,” said another participant who has been spending significant time addressing the shared-services ques- tion. “But really, helping agencies get out of the business of building, sup- porting and updating these commodity workloads is one of the great oppor- tunities for SaaS.”
“There’s more and more of a demand for SaaS,” another executive said, “and specifically on the commod- ity side” — not just HR, but also office automation, communications and col- laboration tools. Yet another said mis- sion partners are demanding specific SaaS solutions as well.
“More and more I get the call, every Friday at 5:00, that says, ‘Hey, my boss says I need to move to’ — pick a plat- form — ‘by next Friday,” the official said, to laughter around the room. “That’s usually the way it happens.”