Reports Highlight Promise and Pitfalls of White House IT Goals

An influential tech industry group on Tuesday released a report with recommendations for developing and deploying cloud services across the federal government, "with the ultimate goal of fostering innovation and economic growth, ensuring U.S. competitiveness, and creating jobs."

The Commission on the Leadership Opportunity in U.S. Deployment of the Cloud, a collaborative effort of 71 members primarily from industry, developed the recommendations at the encouragement of Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra and the U.S. Department of Commerce.

To help agencies move away from storing large amounts of data in sprawling, energy-intensive server farms to more Web-based services, the report provides a number of resources, including a buyer's guide to help agencies adopt cloud technology.

Gregg Mossburg, CGI Senior Vice-President and a CLOUD(2) commissioner, said in a statement, "The mandate to move to the cloud is clear. The critical step, however, is moving from policy into practice."

As if to highlight how challenging it may be for agencies to take those steps, GAO weighed in a few hours later with a critical report on agencies' progress thus far in consolidating datacenter operations, an administration priority enabled by cloud computing.

While the Office of Management and Budget required the 24 participating agencies to submit inventories and consolidation plans by the end of August 2010, only one submitted a complete inventory and no agency submitted complete plans. What's more, agencies did not document the steps they took, if any, to verify the inventory data. GAO reported:

• Fourteen agencies do not provide a complete listing of data centers.
• Fifteen do not list all of their software assets.
• Twenty agencies do not reference a master schedule.
• Twelve agencies do not address cost-benefit calculations.
• Nine do not address risk management.

"Until these inventories and plans are complete, agencies may not be able to implement their consolidation activities and realize expected cost savings. Moreover, without an understanding of the validity of agencies' consolidation data, OMB cannot be assured that agencies are providing a sound baseline for estimating consolidation savings and measuring progress against those goals," GAO said.

The challenges to agencies are considerable. Nineteen of them had trouble obtaining power usage data from utilities. Another nine had difficulty maintaining services during the transition to consolidated services, the watchdog reported.