Be all that you can be…in the cloud

Posted on December 21, 2010 by Tim Harder

Lynn Schnurr, the director of Intelligence Community Information Management for the Army Intelligence Chief Information Officer, gave a presentation at the Army IT Day in Vienna, Va. earlier this month.

During her presentation, she discussed a handful of new technologies and initiatives that the Army is currently developing to help the warfighter on the battlefield and make their entire branch of the armed services operate better and more efficiently.

The Land Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance network remains a priority for the Army. They’re also working on bringing improved biometric data to the soldier on the battlefield.

The Army is even toying around with some pretty wicked headgear to make the warfighter better. According to an article in Defense Systems Magazine, a prototype technology will provide soldiers with smart sunglasses that enable them to capture images of enemy combatants and record their voices for analysis and identification matching.

Even with all of this cool, futuristic technology being developed for the warfighter, one of the largest innovations that could have the biggest impact on the Army is not on the battlefield- it’s in the cloud. Well…it IS the cloud.

In an attempt to operate more effectively and efficiently, the Army is looking to consolidate their hundreds of datacenters for intelligence analysis and storage into just three facilities (Wiesbaden, Germany; Fort Bragg, N.C.; and Hawaii). These three facilities will interact and coordinate with other intelligence community data facilities so that the Army can avoid storing data that can be accessed from other government sources.

The Army also wants to utilize their intelligence cloud efforts to reuse software. This is expected to increase operational flexibility and cut costs.

The Army’s shift to the cloud will help them become exponentially more efficient. They’ll be able to dramatically reduce the cost of excessive and unneeded datacenters while more effectively sharing resources with other intelligence agencies. They’ll also see a significant decrease in the time it takes to develop and implement new software.

What can the cloud do for your agency?

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Get the most out of the cloud with bandwidth acceleration

Posted on December 17, 2010 by Tim Harder

In a previous post on GovCloudTalk, we discussed the steps that government agencies can take towards embracing cloud computing.

During the course of the shift to the cloud, resources across multiple datacenters are aggregated and work as a single resource pool. Unfortunately, many datacenter managers overlook the actual physics of moving the data between those datacenters or to the edge, where the user community exists.

The physical act of moving this data from datacenter to datacenter, or from datacenter to the end user, requires bandwidth. This bandwidth can cost a lot of money. Many agencies looking to move to the cloud are doing so to save money, this makes having to purchase additional bandwidth counterproductive.

These agencies would rather get the most out of their bandwidth providers and utilize their current investments before investing more. Luckily, there’s technology available that allows them to do so, called network and bandwidth acceleration technologies.

There are a handful of network and bandwidth acceleration technologies that exist in the marketplace today, including solutions offered by Riverbed, Cisco, Silver Peak, Asankya, Aspera and a host of other companies. These technologies work as an extension of existing infrastructure and exist on the customer’s premises, within their datacenters.

Cloud adopters are just starting to realize that network acceleration devices could help them transmit data between datacenters and to the edge without having to make an additional investment in extra bandwidth. In fact, some cloud users are starting to think that they should be included in cloud services and packages since they’re becoming a fundamental part of a cloud infrastructure solution.

Regardless of whether network and bandwidth acceleration devices begin to become bundled with cloud service solutions, they are an increasingly instrumental part of an agency or organization getting the most out of embracing the cloud. When looking to make the switch to the cloud, don’t overlook the benefits of including bandwidth acceleration as part of your overall design and planning.

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Is the new government cloud directive a red flag for IT workers?

Posted on December 14, 2010 by Tim Harder

As we’ve discussed in the past, Obama’s technology team, including Vivek Kundra, the country’s CIO, is looking for ways in which the federal government can improve its IT acquisition process and adopt technologies that can make the government operate more effectively and efficiently.

Last Thursday, Kundra announced a series of steps that the government is planning to take to streamline how the government tests and purchases new IT technologies and to help drive down the cost of IT within the federal government.

Included in the plan was a directive for agencies to look to cloud services first to handle increasing data demand. Also included was a directive to reduce the existing number of datacenters in the federal government from 2,100 by approximately 800 datacenters.

The end result of this plan will be a sharing of resources between agencies. For example, if a datacenter is being underutilized by one agency, they will be encouraged to share those resources with another agency in need. Civilian agencies will increasingly make the shift to cloud service providers. Other agencies, such as those responsible for defense and homeland security, will most likely increase their adoption of private cloud solutions that provide all of the benefits of the cloud with fewer security concerns.

The agencies that will see the largest economic gains from their switch to the cloud will be the civilian agencies. These agencies will see a large portion of their IT spends switch from hardware purchases, maintenance and operations to infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

Currently, service, maintenance and operations expenses account for over 70 percent of their budgets, while 10-15 percent goes towards growth and a small fraction goes to innovation. A switch to the cloud will invert that pyramid of expenses and significantly cut down on the downstream expenses, freeing up IT budget dollars for innovation and other more mission-critical tasks.

Unfortunately, not all IT employees at federal agencies see this as a positive thing. After all, if your job is to “keep the lights on,” the switch to a cloud environment could be considered a major assault on your position.

For these individuals, it’s an alarming wakeup call for what’s coming down the pike. Cloud services provide such value and can so drastically reduce operating expenses that the switch has become an inevitability in the federal government. Instead of looking at cloud services as threats to their jobs, federal workers should instead be looking at them as an opportunity to shift towards more mission critical work.

To help in the transition, government agencies are going to have to reeducate staff and move IT people from being maintainers of the datacenter to architects of the cloud. In an effort to help the process, EMC and other vendors in the market are collaborating on a vendor net-neutral curriculum and certification process.

Government IT professionals shouldn’t be viewing the shift to the cloud as competitive or negative. It is, in fact, providing them with an avenue in which to be more innovative and provide added value to their agency and its mission. With government pay frozen for the next two years, it also gives them an opportunity to educate themselves, become more valuable and go up a pay grade. The benefits of the cloud and its ability to help agencies operate better and more cost effectively are making cloud computing the future of government IT. Now’s the time to step up and stop just “keeping the lights on.”

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American innovation takes another one on the chin

Posted on December 9, 2010 by Tim Harder

America was always the nation that built things. We were the leaders in innovation and research. We made the first automobile on a mass production assembly line. We invented the telephone. We sent the first man to the moon. Heck, we invented the pop-up toaster (seriously…look it up).

Unfortunately, our country has been losing its edge in the world of research and development (R&D). As science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education has fallen behind and other global industrial powers have emerged, we’ve started to lose our reputation as an innovator.

Last December, something happened that could finally stick a fork in America as the world’s center of science, innovation and R&D. Surprisingly, it’s flown under the radar and many Americans aren’t really aware of it. The R&D tax credits, which have powered innovation and research in our country for nearly three decades, were allowed to expire and have yet to be extended by Congress.

Now, we’re all aware that the government is currently in a bit of a financial bind and facing a $1.3 trillion deficit. Regardless, the government is practically ensuring that America remains behind in innovation and invention by not sustaining the R&D tax credits.

The R&D tax credits allows medium-sized and large companies to spend multiple year’s worth of money all at once on new technologies that they’re looking to bring to market and then deduct that figure from applicable corporate taxes. This is important because the largest part of the innovation process involves funding and paying smart people to conduct R&D.

If there is no guidance and consistency on the tax credits, it could seriously damage a company or sector’s ability to innovate.

What’s worse, if there’s no net tax credit, companies will have to reconsider how and where they do their R&D. This could lead them to move R&D and innovation to other countries or jurisdictions that have more favorable taxes and treatment for R&D spending.

This means that R&D and innovation dollars go to nations like China or India that are competing with us in the global economy. But there’s another problem with these product development lifecycles going through nations like China.

Our government takes away the R&D tax credits and then pays a company to innovate or invent something. That company is conducting its R&D in China, India or somewhere else. However, our government has already said that they don’t trust product lifecycles that run through these countries.

To have exquisite supply chains, R&D needs to be conducted in America. The R&D tax credits, or something similar, need to be kept in place for American companies to remain innovative and for the government’s supply chain excellence to remain in tact.

Some of the most innovative companies in America spend 10-15% of their revenue on R&D. That’s an activity that we want to continue. If we’re going to continue to create the cloud technologies, IT solutions and other advances that will power our government and economy into the future, Congress needs to extend these tax credits and get America innovating again!

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Why Amazon pulled the cloud out from under WikiLeaks

Posted on December 8, 2010 by Tim Harder

Unless you’ve been in hiding in a cave somewhere, you’ve probably heard about WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange.

The WikiLeaks Website is an international organization that publishes submissions of classified, leaked and otherwise unavailable documents from anonymous news sources. Julian Assange is the site’s founder and editor in chief.

WikiLeaks has run afoul of multiple governments in the past few years in large part to the leaked documents and classified information that it features as content.

In March 2003, they released a copy of the standard operating procedures for the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. During the 2008 presidential election, WikiLeaks reported the contents of a Yahoo email account belonging to Sarah Palin, a vice presidential nominee. In October 2010, WikiLeaks released hundreds of thousands of documents relating to the Iraq War.

Most recently, WikiLeaks released diplomatic cables at the end of November. The leaked documents contained inflammatory and sensitive information about diplomatic proceedings, somewhat embarrassing information about world leaders and other information that experts felt could strain diplomatic relations between the United States and many other countries.

Needless to say, WikiLeaks hasn’t made many government friends, inside the U.S. or elsewhere.

Then, on December 2, something interesting happened. Amazon.com, the company providing cloud infrastructure services for WikiLeaks, severed its ties with the organization.

It’s not uncommon for bad actors to be run off by cloud providers in the past. Service providers have taken action to end their relationships with customers caught using their services to conduct criminal activities. The terms of services that govern most of the cloud providers offer an escape clause for the operator if the service is being used for anything illegal or if it has the potential to tarnish the service provider’s brand.

Now, I’m not a proponent of publicizing information deemed classified by the U.S. Government, especially when that information can be viewed as a threat to the national security. However, this seems to walk the line of censorship.

The actual legality of leaking these documents is tricky. I am by no means an expert on the legal aspects, but these documents were leaked by people and on servers located in countries where significant protection is in place for both media outlets and their sources. That means that Amazon could have effectively booted an organization off of their cloud infrastructure that hadn’t really committed a criminal activity.

If WikiLeaks did something to violate Amazon’s terms of service, they were well within their rights to terminate their relationship. But as a publishing outlet, it’s questionable that WikiLeaks was doing anything wrong. They simply created a platform designed to share and express information. Amazon probably found a loophole on “brand tarnishing” and used it to justify pulling the plug.

But why did they really do it? I think it was a desire to curry favor with the government that led them to pull the plug on WikiLeaks.

Just one day before booting WikiLeaks, Amazon made a major talent acquisition, bringing the person onboard who formerly led Microsoft’s federal business to help sell cloud and other services to the government. Amazon is competing for a handful of government contracts and is clearly looking to ramp up their business with the federal government.

Now if you’re looking to sell cloud services to the federal government, it’s probably not a good idea to be the cloud service provider for the online news organization that has repeatedly and recently angered this country’s leaders by releasing sensitive and classified information.

At the end of the day, what WikiLeaks has done for the sake of transparency in government was ill-advised and potentially harmful for America and homeland security. However, Amazon pulling the plug on WikiLeaks appears to be not an act of civil duty, but a financially-motivated and self-interested act of censorship.

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Where we’re falling down: the administration’s plans to fix government IT

Posted on December 3, 2010 by Tim Harder

In my last post, I discussed a speech given by Jeffrey Zients, the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), to the Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC).

In the speech, Mr. Zients discussed the new programs being endorsed by the Obama Administration that would require agencies looking for new IT development to look at cloud solutions first before pursuing the in-house creation of new datacenters. In my post, I discussed how this could go a long way towards cutting down government spending in the face of a deepening federal budget deficit.

However, this wasn’t the only good point that Mr. Zients made about the state of IT in the federal government. I wanted to take some time to discuss the other points that he made, and places that he felt the government is falling down in the adoption, acquisition and implementation of new technologies.

One of the areas that the Obama Administration sees significant room for improvement is in the IT acquisition system. Currently, agencies are required to submit requests for IT projects two years in advance. After submitting requests and receiving budget approval, the process of acquiring and implementing the technologies can take over a year to accomplish.

That’s three years to get through budgeting and procurement. Everyone with an IT background realizes that it might as well be a lifetime. Any technology that the government was looking to acquire would most likely be archaic by the time the acquisition process was complete.

In an effort to cut down that ridiculously long three year timeframe, the Obama Administration, OMB and other organizations are looking to streamline the appropriations and procurement processes. They’ve already worked to create Apps.gov, the portal where IT buyers at government agencies can shop for approved cloud-based technologies, and are working to put other pilot programs in place that will help to cut through the bureaucracy surrounding IT acquisitions.

Other areas where Mr. Zients and the Obama Administration see room for improvement are the way federal IT buyers interact with industry and the way the government evaluates and monitors IT projects.

Currently, IT managers in the federal government are often hesitant to interact with experts from the private sector and technology vendors because they are unsure about the propriety of such interactions. In many cases, IT managers will often take a “better safe than sorry” approach and avoid these people all together.

To help combat this issue, the Administration is working to put together a “myth busting” campaign to ensure that federal IT managers know what kind of interaction is allowed, and to better align the federal government with private industry. By better educating IT managers, the Administration hopes to foster better collaboration between federal agencies and private industry.

In the area of oversight, the Administration is looking to streamline government accountability, first by overhauling the agency review board policy. Currently, the review boards meet once a month for two hours to review the entire agency IT portfolio, which isn’t nearly adequate. Instead, the Administration wants them to focus more on using data and analytics tools to review projects.

In fact, the Administration’s tech team has already set up an online dashboard to track the spending and progress of IT deployments across the government. These dashboards are designed to generate more detailed reporting data to help government officials identify underperforming projects and decide if they should be rehabilitated or terminated.

I agree completely with Jeffrey Zients and the Administration’s tech team. The budgeting, provisioning and acquisition of new IT technologies is crawling and keeping the government for implementing the tools that will help them operate more effectively and efficiently. These reforms will increase collaboration with the private sector, streamline the acquisition process and better manage government IT projects. In doing so, the Administration will make headway in fixing what is currently a lumbering system that is hurting our country.

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White House dives into IT savings “cloud first”

Posted on November 30, 2010 by Tim Harder

Facing an estimated federal deficit of $1.3 trillion dollars, the Obama Administration has been looking to find ways to trim budgets and reduce government spending however possible.

The situation has gotten so bad, that this week the president asked for a federal employee pay freeze. This would save $2 billion for the remainder of this fiscal year, $28 billion over the next five years and $60 billion over the next decade.

With the state of government budgets so dire, it’s no surprise that the administration and its tech team are working hard to push agencies to adopt cost saving technologies. This is why just a few weeks ago, Jeffrey Zients, the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), announced that the White House would put programs in place in the 2012 budget that would call for agencies to embrace cloud computing over the in-house creation of new data centers.

These programs would mean that every time new IT development is needed, federal agencies would have to look at cloud-based solutions whenever possible. This is a huge step forward for the federal government, which is currently operating more than 2,000 date centers, 1,000 of which were previously “lost”. Even worse, many of them are operating far under capacity.

By forcing government agencies to first consider cloud solutions for their IT infrastructure, the government could see significant savings over time since the creation of new datacenters would require initial investment and subsequent maintenance, support and power to operate. But it’s not enough to make a dent in existing government IT spending.

To truly have an impact on the government IT budget bottom line, the federal government is also looking to prioritize the virtualization and consolidation of existing datacenters. By shifting these datacenters into the cloud, the federal government could save a significant amount of tax dollars on recurring power, support and hardware costs.

They would also see an increase in flexibility that would allow them to increase and decrease bandwidth based on current conditions. This would decrease downtime and allow them to avoid purchasing additional and potentially extraneous hardware to handle temporary spikes in traffic.

I applaud the Obama Administration, Jeffrey Zients and the White House’s tech team for taking steps towards increased cloud adoption in the federal government. These new programs should hopefully drive new IT development to the cloud and work to decrease government spending over time. The drive to virtualize and consolidate existing, under-utilized datacenters by 40 percent will ultimately maximize government IT savings.

With enough money saved on IT expenses and hardware, the Administration may even be able to cancel plans for the federal employee pay freeze. After all, it is the holidays!

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Rogue applications not such rogues anymore…

Posted on November 23, 2010 by Tim Harder

In a recent column that he penned for Government Computer News, Michael Daconta, the chief technology officer at Accelerated Information Management and former metadata program manager at the Department of Homeland Security, discussed “rogue applications” being developed on Microsoft Access within government agency divisions. He also discussed the headache that they’ve become for the enterprise level IT departments.

Michael’s argument is interesting. He states that the ease of Access programming is driving divisional IT staff to create applications to help them reach their missions. These applications, however, are not necessarily scalable across the entire agency and often impede universal management and oversight from the enterprise level.

What’s also interesting, this article was written November 9th of this year. Not years ago. I honestly disagree with Michael on many of his points, due in large part with the proliferation of cloud computing and the quickly shifting federal IT landscape.

Enterprise level IT applications have large and wide-reaching implications for organizations. I compare them to aircraft carriers – they are responsible for a large pre-chartered area, house and protect large full time crews and have a lengthy but necessary supply chain. They also take a long time to start moving and are even harder to turn once they get going. This makes it critical that divisional IT shops that represent a mission, line of business or discreet operation create applications that are smaller and designed to help their particular group accomplish their tasking.

Pacing, innovation and agility comes from mission teams, not core IT. And that’s not a bad thing. The core enterprise IT department is there to put security and other infrastructure in place that allows this innovation at the divisional level.

What’s driving the creation of these “rogue applications” today is small shops embracing cloud computing. This turn to the cloud is because they don’t have large budgets. Also, they don’t want to go through the cumbersome approval channels and deal with government bureaucracy. The cloud enables this application creation without a lot of cost or red tape.

What’s even more important, if the larger enterprise IT department sees value in these applications and it comes time to scale them across the entire agency, the cloud makes it easy and seamless.

Also, core applications aren’t made on Access anymore. The new applications being constructed in divisional IT departments are true “N-tier” Web applications with data housed in SQL, MySQL, NoSQL and object based repositories. Many are premised on new rapid development frameworks like Spring, Heroku, Ruby and Groovy. This is because distributed IT enterprises have distributed application demands, which Web applications meet.

In today’s federal government, IT needs to move at a business or mission pace. Agility, flexibility, cost and scalability are beyond benefits, they’re essential. The development of these “rogue applications” is simply enabling the divisions of federal agencies to accomplish their missions faster and more effectively.

These “rogue applications” aren’t problems because of a lack of oversight and scalability. Since they’re being developed in the cloud, they are easily scalable and easily overseen by core IT. If they’re being built the right way, there’s no reason for the process to be isolated. These new applications are scalable, Web-sharable and Web-enabled, which is a byproduct of the new development frameworks and cloud computing. If your IT department and development team is doing it the old way, fire them and hire a new one.

The fact is, “rogue applications” aren’t the evil villains that Michael makes them out to be. In today’s government IT landscape, enterprise-level IT is too slow and not agile enough to help create the applications and tools needed for small divisions of agencies to better accomplish their missions. “Rogue applications” are essential in the government doing its job faster, more effectively and with increased efficiency, and the cloud is enabling them.

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Tell the federal government how it can fix cloud accreditation!

Posted on November 18, 2010 by Tim Harder

Okay, I know I’ve written about the accreditation process for cloud computing solutions quite frequently in the last few weeks. It’s just been a hot topic in light of the recent NIST event and all of the talk around streamlining cloud accreditation via FedRAMP. But this is the last time I’m going to write about it for a while….I swear.

According to an article on Federal News Radio’s Web site, the General Services Administration (GSA) and Federal CIO Council are looking for feedback from agencies, vendors and the public about process templates, guides, common security requirements and other program-related aspects of FedRAMP.

Although FedRAMP remains an amazing concept on paper, it’s still failing to meet its potential in reality. In addition to taking a very long time to materialize, it still isn’t completely inclusive of all government agencies.

FedRAMP establishes a baseline for security requirements, but still enables agencies the freedom to do additional testing for what they call “delta requirements.” In the case of defense and intelligence agencies where data is extremely sensitive, these “delta requirements” could essentially cause cloud solutions that have received accreditation through FedRAMP to undergo a whole additional set of tests and accreditation processes.

Also, steps toward continuous monitoring are welcome, but it’s unclear how the common operating picture for cloud gets rationalized with the common operating picture for cyber security. They can’t be brought together without a toolset or framework for governance, risk and compliance.

If you have additional comments on FedRAMP, they can be submitted using the FedRAMP online comment form until 11:59PM ET on Thursday, December 2, 2010. Comments will be reviewed by a joint team of representatives from across government for inclusion and updates in the final documents.

Now’s your chance to rise up and be heard. If we all chime in and help to shape FedRAMP, we can work towards making it the inclusive and effective accreditation process that we all hoped it would be when it was proposed.

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Making “Big Data” more manageable

Posted on November 16, 2010 by Tim Harder

In a recent post we discussed how datacenters are being inundated with data due to a proliferation of handheld devices, SaaS applications, networked sensors and other input devices.

The end result of this glut of data being ingested by datacenters is a situation where data capture, storage, searching, sharing, analyzing, and visualizing are awkward and difficult.

This challenge is known as “Big Data,” and it’s an increasing problem affecting all organizations, but especially government entities, which are required to store mountains of data and metadata.

Yesterday, my company, EMC, signed an agreement to acquire Seattle-based Isilon Systems, a leader in the emerging market segment called scale-out network attached storage (NAS).

These scale-out NAS systems enable customers to store and manage “Big Data.” Combining Isilon and EMC’s cloud solutions will give customers a complete storage infrastructure lineup purpose built for managing “Big Data” in private or public cloud environments.

We’ve discussed at length the benefits that cloud computing could have for government agencies. With cloud computing solutions being coupled with scale-out NAS systems, government agencies can now increase transparency, improve collaboration and receive all of the other benefits of cloud computing while simultaneously battling their “Big Data” issues.

Scale-out capabilities and namespace management for cloud infrastructures, whether delivered publicly, privately, on premise or in a trusted service provider environment, are fundamental attributes. The combination of acquired assets from Isilon, along with our organically constructed assets under the Atmos umbrella will offer end users an outstanding value proposition and a competitive portfolio to the market that is unrivaled.

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