Does CBP’s Tombe expect too much from the cloud?
By
Frank Konkel
Readers challenged the Customs and Border Protection CTO’s assertion that 99.999 percent reliability should not cost extra.
Readers critical of CBP CTO Wolfe Tombe suggested he was overly demanding of cloud service providers.
Readers were divided over comments made by Customs and Border Protection CTO Wolf Tombe in a Jan. 29 FCW article headlined “Moving to the cloud? Learn from CPB’s mistakes.” To some readers, Tombe came off as overly demanding of cloud service providers, while others said his comments should be a “must read” for federal CIOs.
One reader wrote:
"Tombe said agencies should demand 99.999 percent -- sometimes called the five nines -- and should subsequently demand not to pay extra for it. Really??? How does that work? Each "9" is an order of magnitude more effort to deliver, and that entails additional cost. Someone's gotta pay for it. Why not just demand ten 9s?”
Another said:
“Demand commercial pricing and then demand additional services that commercial pricing doesn't include and then refuse to pay for it and then test it out in 'small' programs that are just trying to get their work done since nobody cares about them if they fail. Pretty much sums up cloud-first, huh?”
Frank Konkel responds:
I think Tombe’s comments are hardened from experience. Clearly, he and the agency at large were unhappy with one of its initial forays to the cloud – a botched email-as-a-service effort that the agency is still feeling repercussions from.
This isn’t someone saying you should start small in “low profile, low visibility” projects because larger enterprise efforts don’t belong in the cloud; this is someone saying start small and fail fast because practice makes perfect. The mission is still affected if a small program gets botched, but it’s affected a lot more when a large service like email goes down. Guaranteed, if CBP could have a do-over on a few of its troubled cloud efforts, it would take one faster than you can say “infrastructure-as-a-service.”
As for Tombe’s request for 99.999 percent availability without paying extra for it, I believe Tombe is saying that the five-nines of availability are a standard. Reliability is an important factor when considering any kind of cloud service, so it should be part of an organization’s business case. To me, Tombe is saying federal agencies should request what has become standard without paying extra money for it. In a competitive market, his statements – especially for cash-strapped agencies – make sense to me.