Michael G. Meskill: Taking USDA to the cloud

Amazon. Hewlett-Packard. Lockheed Martin. The Agriculture Department.

Which of those does not belong? Actually, they all do because they are all government-compliant cloud service providers.

USDA's entry into the ranks of cloud vendors happened because of people like Michael Meskill. The USDA network architect was instrumental in creating a proof of concept that convinced the department's IT leaders to build a cloud-hosting platform for other agencies. The National Information Technology Center's cloud services are already saving USDA money, including $19.4 million in fiscal 2012.

Meskill told FCW that the scale of the federal enterprise is part of the appeal of government work. "Forming a team of talented people and deploying a solution that will benefit a vast number of people throughout the country is the sort of opportunity that seldom presents itself in most IT jobs," he said.

USDA officials did not set out to compete with commercial cloud providers — they simply wanted to reduce computing costs. But it was hard to get a handle on those costs because of long procurement cycles and the difficulty of estimating computing needs years in advance. However, when the government's push to virtualization dramatically cut costs, Meskill said he was inspired to engineer virtualization levels that exceeded private-sector standards. USDA has gone as high as 50 virtual machines on a single host and has a goal of doubling that.

He also has big ambitions for USDA's cloud services. In five years, he said he hopes to be "giving Amazon and Rackspace some serious competition."