Guest Blog: Sequestration and the Cloud

May 30, 2013 / G C Network /

What has NIST done for me lately?

By G C Network | January 4, 2016

According to a study, 82 percent of federal IT professional respondents reported that they were using the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) cybersecurity framework to improve their security…

Future Ready in the API economy

By G C Network | December 17, 2015

The world of business is software. No matter the industry vertical or business model, effective software is the key to business success.  An even more important aspect of this reality…

Teradata: Embrace the Power of PaaS

By G C Network | December 11, 2015

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has always been the unappreciated sibling of the cloud computing service model trio.  Existing in the dark shadow of the most widely adopted Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and foundationally powerful…

Why cloud changes everything

By G C Network | December 6, 2015

How is cloud computing bringing society and its ideas closer together? This got me thinking. Last week the President of the United States started following me on Twitter. Now I…

The future of data security: An interview with Dell Fellow Tim Brown

By G C Network | November 22, 2015

The Dell Fellows program recognizes engineers for their outstanding and sustained technical achievements, engineering contributions and advancement of the industry. They are also seen as top innovators that have distinguished…

Hybrid IT Governance: Automation is Key

By G C Network | November 19, 2015

As cloud computing continues to grow in importance, enterprises are now facing a new realization.  In their almost rampant embrace of cost savings associated with public cloud, many are just…

Endpoint device management: Protecting the enterprise front door

By G C Network | October 29, 2015

Mobility and cloud computing have combined to obliterate any so-called network security perimeter. Corporate data has now been let loose to roam in a world of cyber thieves, manipulators and…

20 hybrid cloud insights from top industry experts

By G C Network | October 23, 2015

One cloud does not fit all organizations. That’s true whether it is a public or private cloud. A hybrid cloud option allows your business to create  a custom solution that…

Security requires long haul planning

By G C Network | October 13, 2015

On Tuesday, October 6th, the European Court of Justice (ECJ), invalidated the U.S./EU Safe Harbor Framework. This framework, in place since 2000, gave blanket permission to data transfers from the…

Cybersecurity through enterprise risk management

By G C Network | October 6, 2015

Cybersecurity is top of mind for corporations around the world. The quantity of recent data breaches and the dollar loss associated with some of them indicates either an underinvestment in…

(This post was provided by Praveen Asthana, Chief Marketing Office of Gravitant, a cloud service brokerage and management company)

Sequestration burst out of obscurity and entered our household vocabulary in 2013.  It got our attention because the impact of it is $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts from the Federal budget over the next ten years.  About $85B of these cuts will occur by September of 2013 – and these cuts are being disproportionately applied:  Once you exempt the sacred programs, what’s less sacred (like Federal I.T. spending) is going to get hit hard.  Forrester Research analyst Andrew Bartels expects that the Federal budget cuts will shave at least $12B out of 2013 U.S. tech spending (https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9237240/The_sequester_will_hurt_tech_nationally).
So what’s to be done? Computerworld points out that “Dale Luddeke, chair of the Industry Advisory Council (IAC), an IT industry group expects to see a shift in government to things with cost savings attributes, such as open source, and agile development and cloud technology.”
Federal agency CIOs are already there:  At this year’s Cloud Computing for DoD and Government Summit held in Washington D.C. on Feb 26, Richard Spires, then CIO of the Dept of Homeland Security, said in a keynote that he was looking to take out $500M of IT spend from his $5B IT budget and was looking to cloud computing as a primary vehicle to accomplish this.
There you have it:  Cloud to the rescue.
This is not surprising, given that public cloud computing has been shown to reduce IT infrastructure spending by 37% (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.3492.pdf) or more.  And Cloud spending has the additional benefit of converting the capex model (“pay up-front”) to an opex model (“pay-as-you-go”) which gives much more flexibility.
This is not new news.  Cloud computing’s promise has been well known to the government which has had a ‘Cloud First’ mandate for two years now.  But implementation progress towards this goal has been tepid according to the GAO (https://www.gao.gov/assets/600/592249.pdf), due in part to lack of skills, guidance, tools, security and the need for new processes (such as cloud procurement).
However, there is one stand out government entity that has overcome these barriers and seen great success using cloud computing to reduce costs and improve agility:  this is the Dept of Information Resources of the State of Texas.
Nearly two years ago, the State of Texas implemented the Texas Cloud Self-Service Portal (https://www.dir.texas.gov/SiteCollectionDocuments/Texas.gov/ptco.pdf).
State Agencies who used the portal were able to reduce IT infrastructure costs by up to 30% and, more importantly, were able to significantly reduce deployment times for new IT resources from months to days.  This portal was so successful that it is now being extended to all 200 agencies in the State.
The key technology behind the Texas Cloud Self-service Portal was a Cloud Brokerage and Management platform that allowed for the easy onboarding and management of cloud computing resources.  The platform streamlined the assessment, design, procurement, provisioning, and real-time governance of solutions across hybrid cloud environments.
Sequestration is driving a new sense of urgency towards using cloud computing to save costs.  Fortunately, Government agencies now have a roadmap and a tool set to enable them to easier onboard to and use cloud computing using the State of Texas example.  Seeing this, Agency CIOs have now recognized the power of a Cloud Brokerage platform and it is no wonder that every agency CIO that presented at the DoD and Government Cloud Computing summit this year stood up and said they would be implementing a Cloud Brokerage platform.
This leads us to believe that 2013 will be the year Cloud First gets real.

Praveen Asthana is Chief Marketing Officer of Gravitant, a cloud services brokerage and management company. Prior to joining Gravitant, Praveen was Vice President of Marketing and Strategy for Dell’s $13B Enterprise Solutions Division.


Bookmark and Share

Cloud Musings on Forbes
( Thank you. If you enjoyed this article, get free updates by email or RSS – © Copyright Kevin L. Jackson 2012)

Follow me at https://Twitter.com/Kevin_Jackson
Posted in

G C Network

5 Comments

  1. james atel on June 1, 2013 at 4:29 pm

    it,s such a nice and awesum blog about cloud computing info for more plz visit us
    it company in Ireland



  2. Westport Fishing Charter on June 6, 2013 at 3:24 pm

    The game is since you aren't in executive power, hurt the economy all you can so that you can use it as a campaign slogan next time (see? his polices failed, even though we disingenuously did everything we could to make the economy fail).



  3. Carla Dillon on June 12, 2013 at 1:11 pm

    These blogs are valuable because these are providing such informative information for all the people. guest blogged



  4. Russel adword on July 16, 2013 at 11:34 am

    Cloud Computing has various flavors, each purposely aimed at aligning with the varying business modules prevalent today. Managed Cloud Hosting is ideal for businesses that give precedence to factors like impregnable security and high availability instead of costs being incurred.

    Cloud Computing



  5. pramodinidr on October 16, 2013 at 6:23 am

    The post is having edible information , Cloud computing is quite easy to setup and maintain the service as it binds a range of technologies that allow the email security and protection from the virus , spam and other threatens .



Cloud Computing

Cybersecurity