BISNOW Data Center Event Highlight’s Cloud

A big thank you to BISNOW and my fellow panel members for an outstanding discussion and very informative event, last week’s Data Center Investment Conference and Expo. The federal marketplace is certainly being changed by cloud and the data center industry is certainly willing and able to support this important transition.

(Reposted from “Habitat for Data-manity” 

 

Our federal roundtable, moderated by purple tie-wearing King & Spalding partner JC Boggs, explained that agencies are all moving at different speeds to the cloud. The most mission critical programs are moving the slowest. FAA CIO Steve Cooper says his agency is starting to stand up federal private clouds. And there are plans to share that environment with other government agencies, as well as offer them cloud-based services. But Steve says he won’t be the first CIO to go into a public cloud and risk the public embarrassment of a security breach.

NJVC GM Kevin Jackson says cloud is one of those words that’s easily misunderstood. It’s not about IT but an economic and business model, he explains. Agencies that solely rely on their IT staff to make decisions about cloud are making a mistake. He also urged data center providers to pay close attention to FedRamp requirements and make sure any new data center projects include those. Otherwise they’ll be back-fitting.

Wanna know who’ll be the next president? Tucker Carlson isn’t into predictions, but he did tell our audience how to figure it out for themselves. (We always say: Give a man a prognostication, and he’ll comment online for a day. Teach a man to prognasticate, and he’ll go on CNN for life…)

When federal agencies were first mandated to close a huge number of data centers, the size requirements were a bit different. The square footage requirement has gone away, but that doesn’t mean complications have as well, says Equinix federal marketing manager Lee Tamassia. The amount of front-end work associated with inventory and hardware, and what applications are running , and which platforms are talking to other platforms are big factors. Consolidation will happen, but it’s a colossal task.

One concern for Carousel Industries’ Brian Fedak, who designs data centers, is the lack of attention to security. He sees security being cut from shared cloud environment blueprints. Kevin argues that security has always been a concern but a little bit of a red herring. Security in the cloud isn’t different than security in IT, Kevin says. It’s just automated in the cloud. Brian also says that there’s not much difference between the federal and commercial markets for cloud. Both have concerns about data networking design and having visibility into the usage of that data. Check out DC Real Estate pub for even more coverage.

       

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