Guest Blog: Sequestration and the Cloud

May 30, 2013 / G C Network /

How Cloud Brokerage Enables a Practical Path to Cloud IT

By G C Network | March 30, 2013

Join us on Wed, Apr 17, 2013 from 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM EDT to explore how to use cloud brokerage to move efficiently and securely to the cloud. More…

NJVC Cloudcuity Management Portal to Provide Secure Cloud Brokerage Services to NCOIC for NGA

By G C Network | March 28, 2013

CHANTILLY, Va., March 28, 2013 — NJVC®will lead efforts to provide secure cloud brokerage services to the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortiumusing its first-to-market Cloudcuity™ Management Portal during a series…

CloudCheckr : Amazon Complexity Challenges Many Users

By G C Network | March 25, 2013

     A recently released infographic from CloudCheckr (https://cloudcheckr.com/) sheds quite a bit of light on the importance of expert advice when an enterprise decides to deploy to the cloud.  When…

NJVC Announces Winner of Cloudcuity AppDeployer Contest Pilot at George Mason University

By G C Network | February 25, 2013

CHANTILLY, Va., Feb. 25, 2013—NJVC, an information technology solutions provider headquartered in northern Virginia, is pleased to announce the winner of the George Mason University (GMU) Student PaaS Developer Contest.…

Bahrain International eGovernment Forum 2013

By G C Network | February 23, 2013

I am honored to announce that I will be a speaker at the Bahrain International eGovernment Forum, April 8-10, 2013, being held at the Ritz-Carlton Bahrain Hotel and Spa, in…

Why the cloud will shake markets.

By G C Network | February 2, 2013

“Recently, I predicted that in 2013, cloud computing will provide the biggest disruption information technology has experienced in 25 years. These impacts extend to the $128 billion data center industry,…

Top 10 Transformational Impacts of the Cloud in 2013

By G C Network | December 21, 2012

CHANTILLY, Va., Dec. 20, 2012 — NJVC®, an information technology solutions provider headquartered in northern Virginia and supplier of Cloudcuity™ AppDeployer, and Virtual Global, a provider of cloud-enabled enterprise IT…

GovTech Innovator: Kevin Jackson

By G C Network | December 3, 2012

Today I am honored to be named a GovTech Innovator by Government Technology. My personal thanks goes out to Hilton Collins for letting me Hangout with him on Google+. Govtech.com…

How Will Technology Impact Your Business in 2020?

By G C Network | November 29, 2012

by Dennis Brouwer    (Repost from ThinkGig. Thanks for letting me contribute to your ebook!! – Kevin Jackson ) Human-like technology. The potential downfall of the data center. Hyper-personalization of…

The Government Cloud on KCUR-FM Central Standard with Jabulani Leffall

By G C Network | November 26, 2012

A big THANK YOU goes out today to KCUR-FM Central Standard host Jabulani Leffall, producer  Matthew Long-Middleton,and associate producer Danie Alexander for having me as a guest on this morning’s show!…

(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