OMB drafts new 'Cloud Smart' strategy

It has been seven years since the Office of Management and Budget issued its Cloud First approach to help agencies move to the cloud. Under the guidance of Trump administration, OMB has spent a year consulting with agencies and now plans to issue a new cloud strategy within the next few months.

"We are trying to find more ways that agencies can move into the cloud, but the problem is that they have a lot of tiny siloes," OMB Digital Services Expert Bill Hunt said at the June 13 ATARC Federal Cloud and Data Center Summit. "We are tentatively calling the strategy Cloud Smart, and we are looking into areas where we have seen success and best practices."

The Cloud Smart guidance will focus on three distinct areas -- security, workforce and procurement -- as it updates and refreshes the seven-year old guidance issued during the Obama administration, Hunt said.

Some of the data for the guidance has been assembled from internal OMB reports, but the majority of the research has been conducted by visiting agencies directly.

"We've spent a lot of time with CIO shops across the agencies trying to do research to get answers," Hunt said. "OMB is most successful when we visit agencies, learn what you are doing well and how you are succeeding and emphasize that rather than just getting data."

A new OMB cloud strategy was outlined as one component of the American Technology Council’s December 2017 report on IT modernization . A draft will be released for public comments from agencies and industry.

This story originally appeared in FCW's sibling publication GCN.