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The real ROI
Significant savings can be realized in a single cloud migra- tion, but most roundtable participants said the real value comes from the sharing that cloud technology makes possible.
On the security front, for example, FedRAMP autho- rizations have been reused more than 500 times to date. Because it can cost an agency $250,000 to go through an ATO process from start to finish, using existing authoriza- tions translates into “a cost avoidance of approximately $130 million across the federal government, which is about a 221 percent return on investment,” one partici- pant said.
There’s also the benefit of borrowing from others who’ve already made, then fixed, cloud mistakes. “I want to use somebody else who’s already learned how to build a house wrong,” one participant said, “and then we learn from that.”
Broader budget benefits can come from proving that IT can effectively modernize. By embracing cloud, one participant reported reducing the share of IT spending devoted to operations and maintenance from 85 percent to less than 50 percent. Now, even though the agency faces budget cuts in fiscal 2018, agency leaders decided “the one thing that’s not going to get cut is IT,” that offi- cial said.
But the biggest benefit of cloud technology, the group agreed, lies in facilitating entirely new ways of delivering on agencies’ missions.
As one participant put it, “The real prize is innovation and transformation that would be impossible to do inside the infrastructure that exists today.”
Several officials said information sharing is increas- ingly essential, and practically speaking, it can only hap- pen in the cloud.
“How many of us have disparate datasets in our own agency, let alone across agencies?” one official asked. “And how many problems we face today in the United States are in the domain of just one department?”
“It doesn’t have to be the same platform,” another participant said, but it does have to start with cloud infra- structure. “It must at least be out there where it can be used and leveraged and processed so the machine can make sense of it and so humans can make sense of it. Speed is nice, resiliency is nice, but if we’re actually going to ever start working as one government, then we have to find better ways to share.”
Cloud technology alone can’t do that, the group agreed, but it can begin to make such changes possible.
As one official summed it up, “What cloud gives us is the ability to work on the problems that our agency really wants us to work on.” n
PERSPECTIVES
PARTICIPANTS
AJ Bognar
Program Manager, InformationTechnology and Services Consultant, CIO G-6, Department of the Army
Kyle Boyles
CTO, D.C. Courts
David Bray
Then-CIO, Federal Communications Commission
Robert Frum
CIO, Navy International Programs Office, Department of the Navy
Karl Mathias
CIO, U.S. Marshals Service
John Hale
Chief, Cloud Portfolio Office, Defense Information Systems Agency
John Hamilton
FedRAMP Program Manager, General Services Administration
Shashank Khandelwal
Acting Director for Cloud.gov, General Services Administration
Kerry Long
Program Manager, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity
Sara Mosley
Chief Enterprise Architect, Network Security Deployment Division, Department of Homeland Security
Darryl E. Peek II
Director of Operations, OCIO/OCTO, Department of Homeland Security
Chad Sheridan
CIO, Risk Management Agency, Department of Agriculture
Ed Simcox
Deputy CTO, Department of Health and Human Services
Andrea Simpson
Chief Information Security Officer, Corporation for National and Community Service
Navin Vembar
CTO, General Services Administration
Robert Wuhrman
Enterprise Architect, Unified Shared Services Management, General Services Administration
Note: FCW Editor-in-ChiefTroy K. Schneider led the roundtable discussion.The Aug. 23 gathering was underwritten by Microsoft, but both the substance of the discussion and the recap on these pages are strictly editorial products. Neither Microsoft nor any of the roundtable participants had input beyond their Aug. 23 comments.
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