What went into NASA's big website migration

NASA has reached the first milestone in its effort to move more than 1 million pieces of content, including about 110 websites and applications, to an open-source cloud environment. The agency expects the shift from a proprietary to an open-source content management system to save 25 percent a month in operating costs.

The move also makes it easier to post and update content and manage online assets, said Raj Ananthanpillai, CEO of InfoZen, the main contractor on the project. Before the migration, it could take up to an hour to publish information on NASA websites. That time has been reduced to minutes, and the websites can handle more content.

NASA made the transition through its Web Enterprise Service Technology Prime acquisition strategy, which started taking shape in spring 2012 after the original WEST contract was canceled due to a contractor protest.

In the wake of the cancellation, NASA officials re-examined the requirements of the original contract and retooled their approach.

Roopangi Kadakia, NASA's Web services executive, said the team interviewed more than 200 NASA employees and industry partners and found consistencies in what everyone wanted. The main concern was saving money, followed by security and ease of systems administration.

A big goal was moving away from a vendor-specific solution, she added.

"We had been using a proprietary set of tools with our old contract that were hard to migrate out," Kadakia said. "There was really no other way but doing a data dump."

Getting away from proprietary software also helped NASA officials make more informed decisions about the types of tools they were buying and using. It forced people to analyze what they really needed and question current processes, Kadakia said.

In the end, they were able to consolidate more than 25 applications, and Kadakia said her team gets about two to three requests a week to review other applications to see if they can be updated, consolidated or eliminated.

The new cloud environment has also allowed NASA to standardize its technical components, reducing the cost and time of migration. The agency saved 40 percent on consolidation alone, Kadakia said, adding that migration is the most expensive part of the process and typically costs more than agencies expect.

Technology is the easy part. Culture change is what's tough [and] making people feel like they haven't lost control or autonomy over their information.

"It saves money and saves headaches," Kadakia said. "You can have processes that you can't have in other environments."

Although NASA's methodology for moving to the cloud environment is "open first," Kadakia said that does not mean everything is open source. In fact, only a handful of applications are open source, including the flagship site NASA.gov. But she expects that number to grow a lot in the next fiscal year when the agency moves more of its sites to the open-source environment and offers Drupal as a content management service.

The new open-source cloud offering complies with requirements under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program and the Federal Information Security Management Act, and NASA's inspector general has recommended that all the agency's components use WESTPrime, Kadakia said.

While NASA is generally considered to be one of the more tech-savvy agencies, it faces the same cultural challenges when implementing new technology.

"Technology is the easy part," Kadakia said. "Culture change is what's tough [and] making people feel like they haven't lost control or autonomy over their information."

The next phase of NASA's project will focus on bringing more applications into the cloud, Ananthanpillai said. He added that this type of cloud will become more popular as agencies continue looking for ways to reduce their spending.

Nevertheless, he said the challenge of keeping agencies running while implementing new processes is like "changing tires on a moving car."

Note: This article was updated on Aug. 28 to clarify publishing times under NASA's previous content management system.