Page 72 - FCW, July/August 2018

CLOUD
EXECUTIVE VIEWPOINT
A Conversation with
KSHEMENDRA PAUL
KSHEMENDRA PAUL
Deputy Director of Mission and Strategy, Information Sharing and Services Office, Department of Homeland Security
The deputy director of the DHS office responsible for delivering enterprisewide services talks about how to optimize cloud resources
How is DHS shifting from implementing to optimizing
cloud services?
We have early adopters across the department who have moved to the
cloud and, in some cases, been in the public GovCloud for some time. The
real opportunity now is to optimize
our presence in the cloud to realize intentional and targeted benefits at the program level, at the component level and at the enterprise level. This is something that the administration is asking us to undertake.
There has been guidance — executive orders that came out last year on reorganizing government and improving cybersecurity, the “Report to the President on Federal IT Modernization,” the President’s Management Agenda — all of which encourage us to move to the cloud in a smart way.
We’re also seeing the move to the cloud as something that’s accelerating across the department. In 2017, about 9 percent of our applications were either in the cloud or moving to the cloud. The number as reported by components in 2018 is
just over 20 percent of our application portfolio. That number reflects activities moving to or already in the cloud so
it includes new starts, migrations and the folks who are planning as well as underway.
Through that, we saw about a 25 percent increase year over year in what was successfully operating in the cloud and an almost 300 percent increase in what’s moving to the cloud.
Here at corporate, we’re definitely seeing the need, the opportunity and the
demand from components to organize, support and help optimize that migration, so it has a bottom-up component that’s pretty robust.
We’re in the process of standing up what we’re calling the Cloud Steering Group. The purpose of this group is to help us accelerate IT operations to cloud and optimize the remaining data centers. That Cloud Steering Group would be a capstone governance activity chaired by the undersecretary, the vice chair would be the deputy undersecretary, the CIO would be the executive secretary, and
the components would all participate,
as well as the different CXOs here at headquarters.
The role of the Cloud Steering
Group is using the component environment to help identify barriers and opportunities for us to provide value at the enterprise level to the components
as they’re moving to the cloud — and setting a tone of collaboration and accountability and sharing best practices and lessons learned.
We think that developing playbooks and a shared-services strategy for the cloud
is a key opportunity. We think engaging the workforce through communities of interest and supporting early adopters to help them document the lessons learned will be key aspects. We refer to that as a cloud center of excellence concept. We’re committed to that.
This interplay between the bottom-up, active evolution to the cloud and the top- down Cloud Steering Group we formed to credibly tackle enterprisewide barriers and opportunities will be essential to our transformation.
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