Page 28 - FCW, Jan/Feb 2018

FCWPerspectives
A smarter approach
to cloud
Advances in cloud technology are shifting the focus toward choosing the right tool for the job and crafting solutions that truly modernize systems
Several years after cloud adoption became a priority
for the federal government, the technology and the challenges for agencies continue to evolve. Now cloud-based services
are playing a key role in
IT modernization efforts, which increases the pressure on agencies to move their activities from data centers to the cloud.
The way forward is not always clear, however, and regardless of which avor of cloud they choose, agencies still face signi cant challenges related to acquisition models, governance and cost savings.
In December, FCW gathered a group of federal leaders to talk about their experiences and the latest developments in cloud technology. The discussion
was on the record but not
for individual attribution
(see Page 29 for a list of participants), and the quotes have been edited for length and clarity. Here’s what the group had to say.
A question of lease vs. buy
With regard to the government’s prog- ress on moving to the cloud, one par- ticipant said, “We are not as slow as we think we are. A vendor recently told me that government is moving faster to the cloud than the commer- cial sector is.”
As cloud options mature and agen- cies gain more experience, many participants noted a trend toward environments that feature a more sophisticated sharing of responsi- bilities between government and industry.
“You have traditional brick-and- mortar data centers, then you’ve got on-prem cloud and off-prem public cloud,” one executive said. “I think the momentum is going toward that on-premises cloud. My data center is probably moving toward having the infrastructures still provided by the government but the guts and the soft- ware be privately held.”
In other words, “you’re still in the business of maintaining the hard- ware, but the platform and the ser- vice are contracted out,” the speaker added. “I see value in that because you already made the investment in the hardware.”
Another participant drew parallels to earlier investigations into whether it was better to buy or lease computer equipment. “We did studies back in
the ,90s, and the longer you leased, the less it took to become nancially stable in the out-years. I don’t know if the economics have changed — I’ve got to believe they have — but we are having that lease-versus-buy conversa- tion again by doing these on-premises clouds. Even the hardware, end-of-life stuff, we’re going to do that as a ser- vice. We’ll essentially let the vendor upgrade our stuff as it’s made.”
The participant added that “when I recompete that contract, I’m prob- ably going to do a lot as a service. The vendor will handle half my dataset, but the other half will probably be the classi ed stuff.”
Participants also discussed the pros and cons of community and multi-cloud environments. With multi- cloud, “you’re taking the best-of-breed of whatever services you might use,” one executive said. “You might use, for example, the Watson data platform from IBM integrated with the AI plat- form in Azure and call out APIs and Amazon Web Services. I can foresee something like that.”
By contrast, a community cloud is more constrained in terms of struc- ture and the potential for innovation. “There are going to be fewer services and a different quality of services in a community cloud,” the participant said. “You’re isolated, and isolation means that the number of cloud ser-
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January/February 2018
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