Certificate of Attendance

Posted on March 1, 2011 by Tim Harder

Every previous generation intimates that its circumstances were more difficult than the present and for each there are storied and anecdotal ways of relating the harsher state of affairs: “when I was your age, I had to walk to school, both ways, up hill, in the snow, without any shoes” or “when I was your age, if I wanted to talk with a friend, I rode my bike down the block – we didn’t text or have iChat”. Everyone has heard (or even postulated) a similar maxim. Fables like this have a innate method of self-perpetuating and there is rarely a clean demarcation point where an individual can insert themselves and inspect “what it used to be like” vs. “what it us today”. I’m fortunate that I have a very simple but powerful one to share: The Certificate of Attendance.

I believe the Certificate of Attendance to be one of the common era, feel good awards, designed to foster a sense of inclusion. You didn’t earn an A. No problem. Didn’t do your homework? Not your fault. Don’t feel left out – you were along for the ride while others contributed in a meaningful manner. The Certificate of Attendance, it doesn’t say much other than you bothered to show up, at the appointed time, consistently for a given date range.

My generation didn’t really have these ostensible awards, bet yours didn’t either but we’re all too familiar with them.

I’ve been intentionally sequestered and not blogging for the last sixty days or so working diligently on planning for this and the next business cycle. An incredible amount has occurred in those short 8 weeks. Highlights:

• Federal Government has issued the ground cover for every CIO to bring cloud to their enterprise missions
• Cyber, and Cloud are coming together in exciting and scary ways
• Mobile Tablet Sales outpaced PC sales
• Google said “oops” to 150,000 cloud users
• Amazon decided to pick a public fight with Netflix

And most notable over the last sixty days or so
• Over $2Billion in cloud M+A activity occurred driving sector and provider consolidation at crazy multiples

Some of the acquisition targets were worthwhile, with solid balance sheets, customer demanded IP and strong vertical growth engines. Exciting stuff. We’ll talk about how these acquisitions are going to shape the way that cloud services will be delivered in your environment.

A handful though were laggards and simply….received their Certificates of Attendance

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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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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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A trillion reasons to embrace cloud computing

Posted on October 7, 2010 by Tim Harder

It’s no secret that the ongoing economic downturn has had a significant impact on our country. In an effort to stimulate the economy after the housing market, financial services and stock market collapses, the government proceeded to bail out banks, give money to auto companies and spend on major infrastructure projects to provide an economic spark.

The end result? The impact of the stimulus spending has been debated, although a recent report from the White House is very positive. Regardless, the spending has put the country further into debt than before. This enormous national debt and budget deficit has left Washington scrambling, with Republicans and Democrats battling over allowing tax cuts to expire, cutting spending on government programs and other ways to reduce costs.

On Wednesday, the Technology CEO Council, an industry group comprised of seven chief executives from leading technology companies, including EMC, I.B.M. and Intel, met with government leaders and proposed another answer. Just make the government operate more efficiently and less expensively.

According to the Council, the government could save approximately $1 trillion by utilizing new, more efficient technologies. One of those technologies is cloud computing.

As we’ve discussed in previous posts, there are a handful of different ways that cloud computing cuts costs. One of these ways is datacenter consolidation.

Cloud computing enables government agencies and organizations to physically reduce the number of datacenters that they have. These datacenters take up large amounts of real estate and tear through energy. By reducing the number of datacenters, the government can cut down on the amount of physical space that they lease or own, and significantly reduce their recurring utility bills.

Energy and real estate are just some of the recurring costs that cloud computing can help eliminate from the federal IT budget. Cloud computing can significantly reduce the initial hardware costs for provisioning and building datacenters, and effectively future-proof government datacenters. This means that new hardware won’t need to be purchased every time a new technology gets adopted by the government, such as video teleconferencing for telework (which has its own cost savings benefits).

Despite the sheer savings that cloud computing and other new technologies can bring to the government, there are roadblocks to their adoption. Although the government’s chief information officer, Vivek Kundra, has endorsed the adoption of many of these technologies, Congress still needs to pass the funding for them.

Hopefully, the meetings between the Technology CEO Council and government officials, including Lawrence H. Summers, director of the National Economic Council; Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers; Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Fed; and Mr. Zeints of the budget office, will bear fruit and help some of these money saving technologies get adopted. It’s a better solution than cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits, and a lot less painful!

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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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Senate cuts could kill cloud just when it’s needed most

Posted on August 19, 2010 by Tim Harder

Understanding the increasing need to segue the federal government from traditional, physical data centers to a cloud computing model, the Obama Administration requested $35 million to facilitate a cloud computing transition.

However, in light of increasing pressure on the government to cut spending and reduce the federal budget, the Senate Appropriations Committee recently voted to decrease the budget for the cloud computing transition by $15 million, from $35 million to $20 million.

With the federal budget inflated from economic stimulus programs, extensions to unemployment benefits and other initiatives designed to help get the country through one of the worst economic downturns in recent history, it’s understandable that these Senators would want to cut costs wherever possible. Unfortunately, cutting the amount of money needed for a cloud computing initiative is counterproductive for what they’re looking to accomplish.

The benefits of cloud computing in the federal government are multiple and powerful. In addition to increasing collaboration by making important data more accessible and easier to share, the potential for cost savings is huge.

By reducing the amount of federal data centers, the government will eliminate costly and perpetually recurring costs, such as:

  • The high electric bills incurred by running power-hungry IT hardware and cooling infrastructure
  • Property costs (rent, etc.) for the space necessary to house data centers
  • Hardware costs for new equipment

The exponentially increasing amount of data that federal government agencies are being forced to store also means that physical storage solutions will continue to be stressed and new storage capacity will continue to be added. This is just another expense that these agencies will need to incur that could be eliminated with cloud computing and storage.

Cloud computing will also free up IT staff to do higher order tasks. By eliminating the burden of doing commodity operations, cloud computing gives IT staff members a better opportunity to tackle tasks that better align with core mission values.

Much like the creation of America’s space program, the transition to cloud computing will take a significant initial investment. After all, you couldn’t build a spaceship without first building a transistor and microchip. But also like the space program, the transition will yield significant innovation and cost reductions in the long run.

When you look at the federal government’s overall IT budget of approximately $75 billion, the $35 million originally requested for the cloud computing transition is approximately .05%. However, that small percentage has the potential to be the single largest IT cost reduction, if managed correctly.

How many technology vendors of scale are going to be motivated to focus, invest and innovate with such a small cloud computing budget? By promising to redirect the $75 billion in spend to more utilitarian solutions, like cloud computing, the government could better focus the private sector on the innovating new cost-cutting technologies.

CIO’s and agency heads should be motivated to redirect their agency’s IT spend to the cloud. Most CIO’s we speak with tell us that approximately 80% of their budgets are directed towards “just keeping the lights on,” with high-yield innovation and new cost saving expenditures accounting for an abysmally small portion of their IT spend. Cloud and virtualization technology has the capacity to disrupt the legacy model.

Instead of cutting the cloud computing budget and other IT budgets, the federal government needs to begin to look at their IT acquisitions differently. Instead of acquiring technologies based on how much they cost, they should instead be looking for technologies that will eliminate costs in the long run. The value of these IT acquisitions will, over time, be significantly greater and function to save the government large amounts of taxpayer dollars.

If the Senate Appropriations Committee wants to positively impact the country’s current economic situation, they need to do something more creative than simply cutting budgets. The committee needs to promote the kind of technologies that save taxpayer dollars over time, and cloud computing is just such a technology.

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