What Government Needs to Know About the Cloud

Everyone wants to be in the cloud.

But on the road to federal cloud computing is a “timid middle” during which government will fail without a sound cloud strategy, Red Hat Chief Technologist David Egts said.

Speaking at a cloud event with Nextgov, federal and industry leaders offered insight about how agencies can avoid that pitfall.

Taking advantage of openness

Egts explained that open source solutions are an essential component of any federal roadmap to cloud. Developers release most software as open source now, he said, because doing so achieves levels of interoperability, security, access to coders and outsourcing capability that are impossible with proprietary services.

Red Hat is one of many companies returning developments to the source code of projects like OpenStack, an open source cloud platform. But open source allows even more complex levels of collaboration.

“We’re working with Cisco and other vendors, people and institutions that are actually making all these [open source] projects out in the community better,” Senior Director of Red Hat Public Sector Kevin Sherry said. “It’s our job to certify them and support them in a manner that’s safe for the government and for our commercial entities.”

The all-in innovation that arises from open source is vital to the “how” of government’s cloud journey. “Nobody is better than everybody,” Sherry said.

Going hybrid

Open source also makes cloud an area in which government can learn from and imitate the private sector.

Customers around the globe are beginning to realize that they can leverage open source to drive positive change. They can then innovate further in more nimble and cost-effective ways than if they worked exclusively with a public cloud provider.

Breakpoints in the price and speed curves teach customers that public clouds are not panacea, said Mike Younkers, then the Senior Director of Cisco U.S. Federal Systems Engineering. And that’s where the hybrid cloud was born.

Hybrid clouds comprise both public and private platforms and are crucial to cloud success, Younkers said. On-premises data storage plus one cloud provider do not a hybrid cloud make.

Instead, government must inhabit a world of many clouds that can communicate between themselves. For example, when Amazon Web Services built a cloud for the CIA, they needed to maintain communication with the NSA’s private, government-built cloud. With a hybrid structure, the intelligence community boosted its cloud capability and kept necessary connections live.

Focusing on the end user

When cloud first hit its stride, it largely implied a virtualization of the data center. Now, while that strengthening of the core data center is as important as ever, the edge — the users carrying out an agency’s mission — is the force driving innovation, Sherry said.

This focus on the user played a large role in the Federal Communications Commission’s recent migration of its helpdesk to the cloud, FCC CIO David Bray said.

Doing so was challenging — key players in FCC had not only invested time into legacy systems but also earned substantial revenue and established meaningful relationships from them — but Bray stood firm.

The effort paid off. Shortly after successfully moving FCC’s helpdesk to cloud, Bray came across a writer’s account of the new site saving her $1800 in a dispute with her ISP — all because the move allowed the agency to provide prompt and simple service.

Done well, cloud computing is a tool that helps the government meet its most inherent goal: citizen service.

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