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FCWPerspectives
A cloud reality check
The case for moving to the cloud is compelling, but it’s not always the one agencies are making
Some of the government’s top cloud experts would really
like everyone to stop talking about cloud. Not stop using it, mind you, because the benefits can be real and substantial. But when cloud technology is positioned as the end goal or magical cure-all, it’s hard to keep the focus where it belongs: on mission execution.
FCW recently gathered a group of cloud specialists, CTOs and other agency leaders to discuss the cloud conversations they’re having and the steps they believe will help agencies find a real and lasting return on investment in the cloud.
The conversation was on the record but not for individual attribution (see Page 43 for a list of participants), and the quotes below have been edited for length and clarity. Here’s what the group had to say.
Top-level support, but for the wrong reasons
“Air cover” from an agency’s top lead- ers is invariably cited as crucial to the success of any IT modernization effort. But several participants said today’s executive-level buy-in on cloud is creating unrealistic expectations.
“We’re getting a lot of pressure to just go to cloud — ‘Go, go, go, go!’ — irrespective of any mission drive,” one said. “There’s no sense of reality in some cases. They’re approaching cloud as an IT thing, not as an enabler to a mission outcome.”
That pressure can lead to rushed or poorly planned migrations with predictable consequences because “the modernization of an applica- tion requires a lot more than just the technological deployment pattern of cloud,” the executive added. “At the end of the day, you can reengineer your crappy applications and your crappy processes back into the cloud and they would be no more effec- tive or efficient that they were when they were on-prem. But again, we’re getting so much ridiculous pressure from above.”
He said the problem is that top agency leaders “are actually being told that is their No. 1 priority because the department is turning its reform initia- tive into an efficiency initiative, which is code for saving money.”
Further down the organizational chart, however, the view has often shifted. “Three years ago, what start- ed the cloud conversation was cost
savings,” another participant said. But “what we’ve found, through implementation across the depart- ment, is the real selling point isn’t cost savings anymore.”
Program managers and “the people who are doing the work” are focused on cloud’s elasticity and agility and the mission benefits the technology can deliver, he said. “That’s what they care about. But at the end of the day, you still have the senior leaders who look over your shoulder and go, ‘That’s great, but how much money am I saving?’”
The group agreed that such a mind- set can short-circuit an agency’s abil- ity to achieve those mission benefits and possibly the cost savings as well. One participant recalled officials at a civilian agency who “moved a bunch of stuff into the cloud because they thought, ‘Oh, let’s go to the cloud.’ They blew through their storage bud- get in a year and two months, and then had to take it down and move it back. They didn’t understand what their cost was going to be.”
Focusing on mission and managing expectations
Cost is absolutely a consideration, the group agreed, but most argued that agencies should take a broader view.
“We’re going to spend a lot of money migrating,” one executive said. “I told my management that they need to get over that fact. We will save money at some point, but it’s not in year one.” That is due in part to the
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