Page 30 - FCW, Jan/Feb 2018

FCWPerspectives
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January/February 2018 FCW.COM
Finding and paying for cloud services
Many participants praised the General Services Administration’s efforts to improve the Federal Risk and Authori- zation Management Program for buy- ing cloud services.
“FedRAMP is getting much better, which is great because it was sup- posed to facilitate people going to the cloud to give agencies a reason to feel secure,” one executive said. “Instead, it became a huge obstacle. Now it’s coming back to being a secure and great way to move forward.”
However, a number of executives said agencies still need more exible approaches to buying cloud services that go beyond a capital expenditures mentality.
“It’s very complicated to devise a scheme that comports with all the rules, regulations and laws, and move quickly,” one participant said.
Many participants expressed sup- port for buying cloud services along the lines of a pay-as-you-go utility.
“We need to get some exibility to say, ‘I don’t know how much I’m going to use until I use it. Let me have some exibility with the budget,’” one executive said.
“We would like to see our con- tracting of cers have the capability to, as we say, speed cloud,” another participant said. “There’s a learning curve, and that’s part of the problem that we run into. I haven’t found any contracting agency at this point that can offer a contract that is based on pay-as-you-go utility-style pricing.”
Predicting usage is the challenge, and one participant said agencies should be given the exibility to “just measure it over the course of the year, then it becomes more predictable.”
Industry also has a role to play. “There is a perception that every- thing you buy in the cloud is bought as service, but the vendors have in nite exibility,” another executive said. “They can offer enterprise license agreements for cloud services, and they can offer different exible plans.”
Guardrails vs. prescriptions
Once agencies have chosen the right cloud services to meet their needs, the challenge becomes how to man- age them.
“We’re trying to understand how we manage or contain all the excite- ment around the cloud while still trying to create a policy that gives component agencies the flexibil- ity to use it, as well as centralized ELAs that could help with some of our SaaS purchases,” one execu- tive said. “The strategy questions go above just the procurement of it to the management of the busi- ness process.”
Another participant said: “For us, it’s an economy-of-scale issue, because we have at least seven enterprise agreements with a very large software vendor. It doesn’t make sense. The right hand never knows what the left hand is doing. We’re not trying to control because we want to control, we’re trying to get our hands around some really