You Debate. We’ll Innovate.

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Tim Harder

Ok..You Debate…We’ll Innovate….

In his Government Computing News column, Mike Daconta http://bit.ly/GTcsVD , impassionedly argues that the NIST definition for Cloud Computing, with its complexity, is cause for government IT managers  to stay the course with business as usual; intonating that you should buy hardware, software, people, property, plant and repeat every 36 months.  Your budget cycles and key performance indicators are aligned with this legacy and entrenched model.  It worked for a few decades and is well cared for in +$80B worth of budget dollars but it is not without its own complex challenges. The legacy model provided us 2nd order derivatives like misplacing 1000 data centers http://bit.ly/bN3AU3  , a weakened cyber posture and application constructs designed to encourage vendor lock-in.  I agree it would be easy to stay the course but I strongly disagree that definition is a compelling enough cause not to innovate.

The good people at NIST, GSA, Leaf, McClure, et. al, have been leading the charge in this definition work and  driving innovation in their agencies and  the sector writ large. It is absolutely possible and absolutely needed to continue to refine definitions but not at the expense of deploying immediately needed innovation. These folks should be lauded. Not harassed.

Had they waited for debate society work to culminate – innovative projects like Army Private Cloud http://bit.ly/H60zNe   and Apps.Gov http://bit.ly/enikBl  never would have been started. APC is going to save millions in costs, improve the operating picture for warfighters and do it in a more secure fashion. Apps.gov offers untold levels of transparency and easier procurement models.

It is the promise of Cloud Computing which is being realized today by these innovators and projects.

Don’t we owe it to our constituencies:  warfighters, authorizers, civilian services, taxpayers … to refine and innovate?

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You know what’s really cool? An Exabyte.

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Tim Harder

You know what’s really cool? An Exabyte.

One of the more interesting (and challenging) parts of working in the cloud storage sector is the sheer volume of data that organizations are attempting to manage.  From the first RAMAC in the late 50’s to contemporary 4TB spindles there has been outrageous growth at both the individual drive level and aggregate counts across your organizations. Just a few short years ago it was uncommon for all but the most data intensive companies and government services to exceed more than 1PB of capacity under management. Today – that is about 1 chassis of capacity in the most dense of configurations. This week alone I spoke with 6 organizations that each have +100 Petabytes of capacity under management with a YoY growth rate approaching 50%. Back of the napkin – that means in roughly 24 business quarters these very well run organizations will each roughly have an Exabyte under management.

Where is the data growth and volume coming from?

Unstructured content — Files, Blobs, Rich Media and Consumer Generated (digital images).

In a rough approximation – across the organizations I saw this week the split looks something like this –

Document2

Unstructured tiers have eclipsed the combined quantity of DB, Messaging and Backup.

This offers an amazing opportunity for you to control costs and decouple the administrative burden from the growth curve.

Cloud based platforms (on and off-premise) are purposefully designed for these data scales and offers a cost model better suited for unstructured content. When evaluating platforms or applications that benefit from the approach focus in on 4 key themes : Meta Data, Multi-Tenancy,  Metering and Mult-Site. If your application stack passes through these screens you should be evaluating cloud storage based architectures (and business models) to help you on the path to an Exabyte under management.

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IT solutions are not helicopters…

Posted on December 23, 2010 by Tim Harder

We all know the pace of innovation in technology. New technologies are coming out daily and making the technologies developed the day before obsolete. If you’re going to purchase IT systems or solutions, you have to do it quickly, or the solutions you’re purchasing may no longer be worth the investment by the time it’s approved, purchased and integrated.

In this environment, it would seem counterproductive to handle the acquisition of IT solutions, such as cloud services, the same way you would, say, a new military helicopter. Sadly, that’s the way that the Department of Defense has been purchasing IT solutions for the past three decades.

According to a recent Federal News Radio article, the DoD is working to diverge and differentiate the IT acquisition process from the process for acquiring weapons systems. In fact, they recently released a 19 page report that was mandated by the 2010 Defense Authorization Bill and outlines the steps that they’re going to take to streamline the acquisition process for IT.

The DoD currently funds IT projects through three distinct appropriations (research and development, procurement, and operations and maintenance), which is designed more for weapons systems rather than IT. In the report, they state that this might need to become more flexible for IT, since not all solutions need to be custom developed and some can be purchased off the shelf.

The DoD is also toying with the idea of a non-expiring revolving fund for IT. Congress would still control which projects would be paid for with the fund, but DoD officials could authorize programs and give Congress a heads-up after the fact.

Also recommended was a shift in how the Pentagon approaches its IT spending. Currently, large projects and systems are developed and acquired over a long time frame. The new mentality would have the Pentagon approve funding based on desired capabilities, which means funding could be shifted to new products or services that have proven they can provide the capabilities desired. They will also shift the focus onto short-duration, “incremental” IT projects.

The way the DoD was developing and acquiring IT solutions was broken and forcing the agency as a whole to move much slower than the private sector in adoption of new, beneficial IT solutions. With new technological advances, such as the cloud, becoming more widely embraced and adopted due to their ability to make organizations more effective and efficient, it was time for the DoD to make a change and find a way to move at the speed of innovation.

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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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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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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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NIST forum reviews government progress towards cloud adoption

Posted on November 5, 2010 by Tim Harder

In May, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) hosted the first Cloud Computing Forum & Workshop to respond to the Federal CIO’s request that it lead federal efforts on standards for data portability, cloud interoperability, and security. The workshop was intended to initiate engagement with industry to accelerate the development of cloud standards and discuss the potential uses for cloud computing in the government.

Yesterday, I continued my whirlwind trip around the country with a stop in Gaithersburg, MD, to attend the second Cloud Computing Forum & Workshop. This workshop is a bit different in that it’s designed to report on the status of the efforts initiated during the first workshop.

Unfortunately, the report card that they’re going to get is one I wouldn’t have wanted to bring home to my parents when I was a student.

The adoption of cloud computing and other innovative technologies in the federal government continues to crawl. What’s worse, the process for private enterprises to sell their technologies to the federal government is essentially stymieing innovation.

We’ve discussed this in previous posts, and General Clapper even went into detail about this during his speech at the GEOINT 2010 Symposium this week. Essentially, the time, expense and effort to get product accreditation to sell into the government is creating an incredibly high barrier to do so.

This barrier is precluding some of the most innovative technologies from being leveraged by the government. That’s because most of the innovative technology coming out today is from small companies or small divisions of big companies that simply can’t afford the cost and time for accreditation.

Luckily, the government recognized that there was a problem. They tasked NIST with creating a simple and lower cost certification and accreditation process for cloud-centric technology. NIST began the creation of FedRAMP, which offers one stop shopping for accreditation and authority to operate. FedRAMP would be recognized across multiple constituencies and multiple agencies in the government, essentially lowering the high barrier standing between these companies and selling into the government.

Although government agencies are talking about FedRAMP’s imminent launch, its implementation is going to take far longer than advertised. Right now, FedRAMP is in a consensus-building stage, trying to get influencers at government agencies on board. The technical details are there, but the agencies need to buy in. Unfortunately, that’s something that’s easier said than done.

But this isn’t FedRAMP’s only issue. The program is truly only applicable for civilian, non-combat and non-intelligence agencies. The Department of Defense (DoD) and intelligence agencies will always have higher hurdles for security than civilian agencies. And we completely understand. When national security and the lives of citizens or soldiers are on the line, the standards should be higher.

Unfortunately, this greatly reduces the impact of FedRAMP, since a large sector of the federal government will most likely want to continue doing its own accreditation. What may be needed is another, DoD and intelligence focused program similar to FedRAMP with even stricter accreditation standards.

During NIST’s next Cloud Computing Forum & Workshop, the news isn’t going to be all good. Granted, steps such as the GSA IaaS BPA have been taken, but when it comes to accreditation, feet are still being dragged and enough is not being done.

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The view from the GEOINT 2010 Symposium floor

Posted on November 2, 2010 by Tim Harder

As I discussed in a previous post, the EMC team and I are currently at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center‎ in New Orleans for this year’s GEOINT Symposium.

The GEOINT 2010 Symposium is billed as the preeminent geospatial intelligence event for the defense, intelligence and homeland security communities and it shows. There are more than 3,000 attendees and more than 200 vendors currently in attendance, making this one of the single largest GEOINT and intelligence shows ever.

This morning we were treated to a keynote speech by James R. Clapper, a retired lieutenant general in the United States Air Force and current Director of National Intelligence. The General spoke about something that has been a topic of hot debate on my blog and in the government, the adoption of new technology, including cloud computing.

According to the General, industry is innovating new software and technologies at a pace faster than the government can adopt it. This is mainly due to the existing inhibitors towards adopting new technology, such as the accreditation process.

The problem comes down to government IT departments being overly concerned about the pedigree of the software and technology. They want all technologies to have and auditable lifecycle of development and audit chain so that they can follow the innovation process from conception to execution.

What worries them is that the people, companies and organizations innovating these technologies are bad actors. They’re nervous the software and technology that gets embedded in the supply chain can become something malicious. As a result, they want to know who has worked on it, where they are, and more.

This makes sense and is completely understandable when considering exquisite and mission systems that are protecting our homeland security or troops in the field. In those situations it’s reasonable to have multi-year development cycles and extensive accreditation process. However, for other systems it may be extraneous. At the end of the day, if the government wants to adopt technologies as they are being created and innovated, then a new approval and accreditation process is in order.

In addition to the incredible keynote from General Clapper, the EMC team and I have seen some really interesting and surprising trends emerging from this year’s conference.

One impressive trend is the increasing crosschecks and collaboration occurring between vendors working on solving real mission challenges. In fact, the EMC team was even approached by a competitor who proceeded to highlight a few places where the two companies could be collaborating to help meet mission success. The importance of delivering a holistic solution to the end-user community is ultimately more important.

Another interesting trend that I’ve seen is the separation or differentiation of the intelligence community from the defense community, at least financially. I’m being told that in the 2013 budget cycle, the intelligence community budget will be taken out from the larger DoD budget and moved to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. This shift of nearly $50 billion will essentially lead to increased transparency and accountability to what the intelligence community’s spending profile is and how it is being managed.

Finally, I’ve heard a lot about education. In fact, there was an entire break-out session about it. Much like I previously discussed on GovCloudTalk, STEM subjects are becoming a hot topic in the GEOINT and IT space. The nation’s intelligence and defense leadership is seeing the results of inadequate science, technology, engineering and math education and are not happy with what they are seeing. They’re calling for more STEM subject embedded earlier on in the educational careers of America’s students, and I couldn’t agree more.

This year’s GEOINT 2010 Symposium is bigger and more important than ever and I’m truly excited to be on the floor hearing about the large issues facing today’s intelligence and defense industry. If you’d like to discuss these issues and trends, feel free to drop by the EMC booth (#821), or our reception with Cisco and VMWare at the Musee Conti in the Old French Quarter.

*The pictures in this post include a look at the EMC booth, as well as a large military vehicle that pointed a gun at me. Yes, I do have a cool job … and yes … it was pretty scary.

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Different agencies have different problems – with the same solution

Posted on October 21, 2010 by Tim Harder

It’s very difficult to look at the federal government as a whole and find one overarching IT problem that all agencies are facing.

The fact is, there are too many agencies and organizations within the federal government with far too many differing missions to truly say that one IT problem affects them all equally.

Within the government you have civilian agencies, defense agencies and intelligence agencies. These different kinds of agencies understandably operate with varying amounts of transparency, require varying levels of data security and ingest, manage and store different amounts of data. As a result, they will see some overlap in their IT challenges, but tend to have their own unique challenges that the other agencies either don’t face, or don’t struggle with as mightily.

Ironically, despite their drastically different IT challenges and needs, one single solution – a switch to the cloud – could equally assist these agencies. Let’s take a look at the different kinds of agencies, the challenges that they face, and the way that cloud computing could help overcome them:

Civilian agencies

Little Timmy turns 17 and passes his first driver’s exam with flying colors. All of his information is entered into a system at the local DMV. His picture is taken. A license is issued.

But the DMV gets something else in return. They now have a picture of Little Timmy and all of his information that needs to be stored as data. They also have to manage that data and ensure that it is archived in such a way that it can be accessed again in two weeks when Little Timmy misplaces his first license. It also has to be shared with the local police department and other agencies who need to know Timmy’s information should he get caught speeding or accidentally take out a mailbox (although I am currently contesting a D.C. area speeding ticket….I haven’t hit a mailbox or lost a drivers license in some time…I swear…).

This story may sound silly, but it perfectly encapsulates one of the largest problems facing civilian agencies. Since they serve the public, there are often mountains of scanned forms, ID photos, tax records and every other kind of data imaginable that needs to be ingested, stored and managed.

Much of this data is coming in from disparate, untethered devices. This influx of unstructured content from distributed sources needs to be ingested in extraordinary amounts and also needs to be managed with a small staff.

By shifting to cloud computing, civilian agencies can almost infinitely extend their amount of data storage. Cloud computing can also help them to overcome the “big data” issues that arise from the sheer size of the amount of data they ingest. A shift to the cloud also makes sharing information both within and between agencies easier.

Defense agencies

Defense agencies have some of the same problems that civilian agencies do regarding the ingestion, management and storing of large amounts of data. Soldiers have IDs, military technology has manuals and there are equally large mountains of forms and other information that needs to be stored.

However, some things unique to the defense agencies are their need for high security, and their ability to deliver information about what’s happening on the battlefield to the decision and policy makers thousands of miles away.

Defense agencies have multiple, disparate command and control systems that need to be accessed in different places and by different audiences at different times. Web enabling command and control systems makes them more scalable, accessible and efficient.

From a security standpoint, cloud computing can help agencies consolidate datacenters and then focus all of their resources on securing the datacenters that remain. Some cloud infrastructures such as private clouds can also provide security that is in fact better than many federal datacenters.

Intelligence agencies

Once again, I can’t say that intelligence agencies don’t suffer from the same IT challenges that we’ve laid out above, because they do. In fact, the large network of sensors and other untethered input devices utilized by America’s intelligence community creates very similar problems in ingesting, managing and storing data that civilian agencies have.

Information sharing is one IT challenge facing intelligence agencies that, although not unique to them alone, is exasperated by their specific mission. Intelligence agencies have many personnel, offices and branches distributed across the globe. These distributed presences need the ability to share information and data to ensure that the latest intelligence is available where it’s needed most.

Embracing cloud computing is extraordinarily important for intelligence agencies due to its ability to increase information sharing both inside an agency, and between agencies.

There are multiple challenges facing all areas of the federal government today. Each agency will struggle with one of these challenges more than others due to their mission, their need for transparency and the sensitivity of their data. But, regardless of which problem is the biggest for an agency, some type of cloud computing can be the answer.

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The eight largest data center headaches facing the federal government today

Posted on September 30, 2010 by Tim Harder

In my work with EMC, I spend a lot of time traveling around the country meeting with government technology decision makers. Although all of this travel takes me far from home for long stretches time, I do get to have some great conversations with these individuals.

Some of the things that we talk about, more often than not, are the challenges that these CIOs and IT professionals are having. Interestingly enough, these challenges are often not exclusive to any one agency, but are experienced in federal data centers and IT departments across the government.

Here are the challenges that I personally hear about the most. A virtual “top ten” list of the biggest headaches plaguing IT professionals today…but there’s only eight:

Perpetually growing data: Organizations are being tasked to manage increased amounts of unstructured content. This data is coming in from an almost limitless amount of endpoints, including many mobile devices and sensors. Storing, searching and otherwise managing this epic amount of data has become an increasingly large problem for federal agencies.

Globally distributed operations: Today’s federal agencies are being run in a truly distributed fashion. An agency with headquarters in Washington, DC, could have offices, operations and employees in Huntsville, AL, or a myriad of other locations across the globe. The challenge for these agencies is to create a system that manages data across multiple geographies, securely.

The rise of Meta-Data: It’s not enough to actually have to store data. Now, many government agencies have to store meta-data…which is data about data. Meta-data has become just as important as the actual data elements themselves, which is adding to the first entry on our list…perpetually growing data.

Increasing government transparency: As part of the Obama Administration’s campaign promise to increase transparency in the federal government, entities are being tasked to provide more information to the general public and offer more electronically enabled constituent services. This is driving demand for Web technologies. Unfortunately, in light of ongoing economic issues, capital budgets are staying flat and, in many instances, declining. This is making it difficult to invest in infrastructure purchases, especially ones that will require additional operating and maintenance costs in the future.

Cybersecurity: This shouldn’t be a shock to anyone, since cybersecurity is one of the hottest IT topics and remains a concern to all organizations, both private and public sector. The federal government is concerned about both defensive and offensive cybersecurity capabilities. This, in turn, is driving discussions around governance, risk and compliance and arguments around what data should reside on what network.

The SaaS Revolution: As agencies move from traditional, large scale ERP applications towards web enabled SaaS applications and mobile device “apps,” web-scale systems that can easily flex to meet capacity workloads are becoming increasingly important.

The evolution of applications: The Application “stacks,” or set of applications that are typically required by an organization, are giving way to Infrastructure and Platform services. These services demand common libraries and lifecycle management.

Interagency share: Many organizations have been tasked with sharing data elements across projects, programs, end users and mission scenarios. This is especially true between agencies responsible for defense and homeland security. As a result, institutional archives and heritage assets on older, fixed media are being converted in massive quantities to sharable, retaskable digital formats.

Not surprisingly, many of these challenges can be addressed through adoption of cloud computing. In later posts we’ll be analyzing some of these challenges closer, and discussing ways in which cloud computing can help to overcome them.

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