Federal CIOs Still Face Cloud Computing Hurdles
U.S. government agencies want to use more cloud-computing services, but several hurdles still stand in the way, including the U.S. government's budgeting process and a lack of understanding of government's needs by vendors, three agency IT executives said.
Thu, May 21, 2009
IDG News Service — U.S. government agencies want to use more cloud-computing services, but several hurdles still stand in the way, including the U.S. government's budgeting process and a lack of understanding of government's needs by vendors, three agency IT executives said.
In some cases, cloud-computing vendors don't understand the scope of what government agencies need, said Chris Kemp, CIO at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Ames Research Center in California. Some cloud-computing vendors offer a small cluster of computers, while NASA often needs massive clusters to perform scientific research, said Kemp, speaking at forum on new IT approaches for the federal government.
"We operate at science scale, not enterprise application scale," Kemp said at the forum, sponsored by MeriTalk, a government IT discussion site, and Affirm, a nonprofit group focused on improving information management in the federal government.
Kemp and two other government IT managers expressed strong interest in cloud computing, with all three saying they are in some stage of experimenting with it or deploying it. Cloud computing will allow agencies to share computing resources and to cut energy use if done correctly, Kemp said.
The advantages of cloud computing "are so compelling, I don't think there's any going back," added Casey Coleman, CIO at the General Services Administration.
Cloud computing also can help government agencies get access to computing resources much faster than current requisition methods, Kemp said. "If we can provision infrastructure in the cloud and make that a five-minute operation and not a three-month operation," that's a major benefit, he said.
But government agencies are still ironing out ways to write new contracts that cover cloud computing, said Doug Bourgeois, director of the National Business Center at the U.S. Department of Interior. The National Business Center, focused on providing business services to other agencies, is looking at providing more cloud-computing services, but it needs vendors to be more flexible, he said.
"How can the private sector infrastructure providers provide me with a business model that's pay as you go?" he said. "My customers are only going to pay for what they can use. I need to purchase infrastructure and technology under the same model, so it's truly a shared-risk partnership."
In addition to the vendor issues, several government obstacles to cloud computing exist, the panelists said. U.S. government computing systems need to meet several regulations, including cybersecurity rules under the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), Coleman said. Vendors say they can comply with those regulations, but contracts to cover those rules will be complicated, she said.
