The Obama administration on Tuesday announced a far-reaching and long-term cloud-computing policy intended to cut costs on infrastructure and reduce the environmental impact of US government computing systems.
Speaking at Nasa's Ames Research Center in California, federal chief information officer Vivek Kundra unveiled the administration's first formal efforts to roll out a broad system designed to take advantage of existing infrastructure and, in the process, cut federal spending on information technology, especially expensive datacentres.
According to Kundra, the federal government today has an IT budget of $76bn (£46bn), of which more than $19bn is spent on infrastructure alone. And within that system, he said, the government "has been building datacentre after datacentre", resulting in an environment in which the Department of Homeland Security alone, for example, has 23 datacentres.
All told, this has resulted in a doubling of federal energy consumption from 2000 to 2006. "We cannot continue on this trajectory," Kundra said.
That is why the administration is now committed to a policy of reducing infrastructure spending and instead relying on existing systems, at least as much as is possible given security considerations, Kundra said.
As an example of what is possible with cloud computing, Kundra pointed to a revamping of the General Services Administration's USA.gov site. Using a traditional approach to add scalability and flexibility, he said, it would have taken six months and cost the government $2.5m a year. But by turning to a cloud-computing approach, the upgrade took just a day and cost only $800,000 a year.
Kundra did not go into detail about how long it may take the government to transition fully, he hinted it could take as much as a decade to complete the cloud computing "journey".
Three-part initiative
While repeatedly referencing the fact many government efforts must make allowances in their IT needs for security, Kundra argued that in many other cases, there is little reason federal agencies cannot turn to online resources for quick, easy and cheap provisioning of applications.
As a result, the first major element of the initiative is the brand new Apps.gov site, a clearing house for business, social media, and productivity applications, as well as cloud IT services. The site is not yet fully functional. But it is evident the administration hopes that for many agencies, the site will eventually be a one-stop shop for the kinds of services that to date have required extensive IT spending, and Kundra said he believes some at the Department of Energy has already been using the site for some of its needs.
The second element of the effort, Kundra said, will be budgeting. For fiscal year 2010, the administration will be pushing cloud-computing pilot projects, reflecting the effort's priority and hopes that many lightweight workflows can be moved into the cloud. For fiscal 2011, it will be issuing guidance to agencies throughout government.
Finally, the initiative will include policy planning and architecture that will be made up of centralised certifications, target architecture and security, privacy and procurement concerns. Kundra said every effort will be made to ensure that data is protected and secure, and that whatever changes are made are "pragmatic and responsible".
Clearly, though, the administration has seen benefits in the way private industry uses cloud computing, and intends to mirror those benefits. Ultimately, he added, the idea is to make it simple for agencies to procure the applications they need. "Why should the government pay for and build infrastructure that may be available for free?" Kundra asked.
One inspiration, he explained, are advances the government has already seen in the streamlining of student aid application forms. The so-called Fafsa (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) form is "more complicated" than the federal 1040 tax form, Kundra said. But in a joint effort between the IRS and the Department of Education, it has become possible with one click of a mouse button for IRS data to populate the Fafsa form, Kundra said, eliminating more than 70 questions and 20 screens.
If the government seeks to do such things across the board, it will ultimately deliver large savings to taxpayers and significantly reduce the environmental impact of government IT systems.
Talkback
This sounds like a good approach mass consolidation of existing resources, as well as cut some of the red tape in things like the student application form & IRS forms and I dare say a lot more, this is something our next UK government could also be looking into to make use of some of the amassed systems our current establishment has waisted money on.