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Federal Cloud Computing
The Definitive Guide for Cloud Service Providers
By Matthew Metheny Elsevier Science
Copyright © 2013 Elsevier, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59749-739-8
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Introduction to the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy
INFORMATION IN THIS CHAPTER:
• Introduction
• A Historical View of Federal IT
• Cloud Computing: Drivers in Federal IT Transformation
• Decision Framework for Cloud Migration
INTRODUCTION
In February of 2011, the former US Chief Information Officer (CIO), Vivek Kundra, published the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy, herein referred to as the "Cloud Strategy." The Cloud Strategy, as illustrated in Figure 1.1, was one of six major components of the US CIO's roadmap to the cloud as defined in the 25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal Information Technology Management.
In the Cloud Strategy, the federal government's strategic approach for the adoption of cloud computing technologies was described, including the potential benefits, considerations, and trade-offs. The strategy also provided a decision framework for federal agencies to use in outlining their plan for using cloud computing to improve their efficient use of information technology (IT) investments to support their missions by leveraging shared infrastructures and economies of scale. This framework focused on changing how the government approaches IT and how it could effectively integrate cloud services into its existing IT portfolio.
The Cloud Strategy established a set of basic principles and guidelines through which decision-makers within federal agencies could use it to accelerate their secure adoption of cloud services. Through the strategy, federal agencies were empowered with the responsibility for making their own decision on "what" and "how" to migrate to the cloud in support of the government-wide Cloud First policy. The Cloud First policy was established to create the momentum for federal agencies to proactively adopt cloud computing services by requiring them to begin with the selection of three "cloud-ready" IT services that could be migrated to secure and reliable cloud solutions.
In the section Decision Framework for Cloud Migration, a three-step framework described the foundational elements that were identified as being necessary for building a successful migration plan. In addition, the Cloud First policy gave federal agencies the opportunity to exercise their migration plans and develop and share "lessons learned" from their experiences. The policy also established the requirement for a program to be developed that would encourage Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) to meet federal security and privacy requirements through the development of "government-ready" cloud services.
The federal government's shift, from a traditional asset-based model focused on acquiring IT, to a service-based model offered by cloud computing is not only a change in the technology, but also a cultural change in the organization itself. The "shift" towards cloud services also requires organizational changes for managing the people and processes that are needed for procuring and provisioning cloud services. Cloud computing places an increased importance on how technology is planned, selected, and integrated. The new service-based approach to IT requires federal agencies to learn how to manage services rather than assets. To effectively provision cloud services so that there can be an achieved optimization of resources, federal agencies will have to link the benefits of cloud computing to their strategic plans. In addition, federal agencies will also have to establish new governance processes and practices to ensure the adoption of secure cloud services adheres to the federal information security and privacy requirements.
A HISTORICAL VIEW OF FEDERAL IT
In the Cloud Strategy, the federal IT environment was characterized as having "low asset utilization, a fragmented demand for resources, duplicative systems, environments which are difficult to manage, and long procurement lead times". This characterization was the result of an accumulation of issues stemming from years of mismanagement and the over-capitalization of IT.
In this section, we will focus on introducing several key historical points within the federal government where the adoption of IT produced trends that led to the growth in the federal IT budget. Figure 1.2 provides a high-level illustration that depicts how the federal government's IT budget and portfolio changed with the transition to newer technologies.
Our review will begin with mainframe computing (a highly centralized environment) and end with the federal government's transition to mobility (a highly decentralized environment). For completeness, the review will also include a brief discussion of the evolution of federal IT laws and policies developed over time to manage issues across the federal government such as acquisition, governance, privacy, and security.
The Early Years and the Mainframe Era
The origins of modern computing can be directly linked to the US government. As the first significant user of computers, the US government consequently became one of the primary sources for most of the funding for the innovation and research in computing technology. In the early years, computers were very expensive, slow, inefficient, and took up a sizeable footprint, making them impractical for use outside of the U.S. government or research facilities. Despite limitations, the U.S. government continued to finance the development and advancement of computer technologies. Originally, computers were only used for military applications. However, this initial investment would serve to establish the beginnings of an industry that would shape how the federal government would use and operate computers today.
The first digital computers used by the federal government before the 1950s were primarily used for scientific and defense purposes. Although from the late 1940s to early 1950s the federal government's interest began to change their focus on using computers to address broader business challenges. In 1951, the emergence of the UNIVersal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC) I created opportunities to use computers for application outside of the US Department of Defense (DoD), and the UNIVAC became the first business computer purchased by the Bureau of the Census to be used for the population and economic censuses. During the remainder of the 1950s, several other civilian federal agencies also began to acquire and use mainframes to supplement and support mission-specific operations. Federal agencies saw these computers as a useful tool for improving the productivity of more resource-intensive business support functions. For example, mainframes were used to more efficiently and accurately calculate tax returns (Internal Revenue Service), to calculate social security benefits (Social Security Administration), and to generate labor statistics (US Department of Labor).
The federal government's acquisition activity for computers began to increase significantly as the shift changed from using mainframes for basic business support functions to more complex mission-specific applications. As a result, the federal government increased its purchasing of computers from 531 computers (or $464 million) in 1960 to over 5277 computers (or an estimated $4 to $6 billion in capital expenditures) in 1970. The significant increase in the computer inventory was primarily the result of federal agencies having the purchasing power to procure resources needed to support their own individual needs and requirements.
As the federal government's mainframe inventory grew, federal agencies began to face challenges associated with vendor and technology lock-in. As was customary in industry pricing practices at that time, software and engineering support services were bundled with the hardware. This bundling resulted in federal agencies being locked into their mainframe vendors, making the migration between technologies a challenge because the manufacturer had full control over the entire stack, from the proprietary mainframe hardware platform to the software applications. In the 1980s, after the pricing practices began to change as major mainframe manufacturers started to unbundle the hardware, software, and engineering support services, the federal government was faced with a limited number of companies in the mainframe market. This made it even more difficult for federal agencies to modernize their legacy applications.
Shifting to Minicomputer
The advancement in hardware technology introduced the integrated circuit and the market evolved to midsized computers. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the federal government also began to shift away from using mainframes and began acquiring minicomputers. For the federal government, minicomputers provided a more efficient improvement in central processing and "time sharing" capabilities offering a much lower cost and size, thereby enabling them to be more broadly available across the federal government. By 1974, as illustrated in Figure 1.3, more than fifty (50) percent of the computers in the federal government cost less than $50,000 and the inventory exceeded 8600.
Minicomputers offered the federal government greater opportunities to use technology to increase productivity through the use of automation to lower economic costs in areas where repetitive activities were being performed manually. As an example, minicomputers were used by the National Weather Service to automate forecast offices, the Internal Revenue Service for electronically preparing individual tax returns, the Federal Aviation Administration to automate air traffic control functions, and the US Department of Justice to automate legal information and retrieval.
Decentralization: The Microcomputer ("Personal Computer")
By the mid-1970s, the emergence of the microcomputer decentralized computing and empowered end-users within the federal government. The significantly lower cost gave federal agencies the ability to extend microcomputers to a broader workforce with hopes of improving productivity across the federal government. For example, in 1983, the US General Services Administration (GSA) began opening Office of Technology Plus (OTP) stores ("GSA microcomputer stores") to make it easier for federal agencies to procure microcomputers by streamlining the buying process.
Microcomputer adoption continued to gain significant momentum in the mid1980s. By 1986, the federal government had amassed the largest inventory of computer equipment in the world, with a cumulative IT budget of over $60 billion between fiscal years 1982–1986. As illustrated in Figure 1.4, the government-wide microcomputer inventory increased from 2307 in 1980 to 99,087 in 1985.
The accelerated growth in the IT inventory was also challenged with an underdeveloped information resource management (IRM) practice that began to impact the overall value and performance of the federal government's return on its IT investment. The federal government saw impacts in areas such as the efficiency in delivering citizen services; maintaining the security and privacy of information stored in computerized form; and the quality of government IT management.
Transitioning to Mobility
Fast forwarding to today, the federal government operates in a more complex world that includes a mix of technologies. The emergence of different types of platforms (e.g., smartphones and tablet computers) offers the federal government new opportunities to improve its efficiency, while at the same time it faces the challenge of ensuring the security and privacy of vast amounts of digital information. With a broad array of mobile devices available, the federal government is starting to embrace the investment in mobility. The expansive adoption of technologies that enable mobility will require the federal government to confront potential new challenges relating to the management of these different devices, the supporting infrastructures, and the software applications. In addition, federal agencies will need to learn to manage the continued growth in mobile applications and services to optimize the efficient use of these technologies and make their "business case" for mobility.
Many federal agencies have already become accustomed to using mobile computing devices (e.g., laptops) through their experience in teleworking. Federal agencies are also continuing to explore opportunities that would maximize the benefits gained through the use of other mobile devices to enable them to operate more cost-effectively and efficiently. Therefore, as federal agencies make the transition to be more mobile and increase their usage of mobile computing devices, they will be required to be more proficient at both managing and securing different types of devices. This also means federal agencies will need to learn how to select, provision, and manage secure cloud services that will be leveraged as more information is moved into digital services so they can be accessed by endpoint devices anytime, anywhere.
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Excerpted from Federal Cloud Computing by Matthew Metheny. Copyright © 2013 by Elsevier, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of Elsevier Science.
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