Page 28 - GCN, June/July 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 is responsible for delivering enterprisewide services talks about how to optimize cloud resources
How is DHS shifting from implementing to optimizing
cloud services?
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.
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. 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.
What are the benefits of using optimized cloud resources? Moving to the cloud can advance the DHS mission in three areas. One is the mission itself. We think there is the opportunity
to increase agility and speed, improve our cybersecurity posture and better leverage our data. The second bucket we are looking at is efficiency. We think there is the opportunity to realize unit cost savings, reduce capital expenditures and shift reinvesting in new capabilities from the legacy investment
that’s predominantly in operations and maintenance.
We also see the opportunity to transform as an organization by engaging our workers and helping them develop and move toward the skills of the future, while developing a federated unity of effort and moving to an as-a-service IT service delivery operations model.
Mission, efficiency and transformation are the top-line benefits now. Realizing those benefits requires smart planning, execution and oversight. With our early cloud adopters, some programs are seeing some benefits, but uniformly we’re not seeing the benefits I just talked about. That underscores the need for optimization.
The early adopters are seeing that they’re all at the beginning of a learning curve about how to optimize in an effective way. A key strategy within our Cloud Steering Group
is to leverage the early adopters and help them move up the learning curve so that we’re realizing some of those benefits and then leaving repeatable processes behind so we can scale out their experience across the department.
This interview continues at Carahsoft.com/Paul-DHS
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