Guest Blog: Sequestration and the Cloud

May 30, 2013 / G C Network /

“Cash for Clunkers” Should Have Used the Cloud!

By G C Network | August 24, 2009

Rich Bruklis wrote an excellent essy on how the government missed a perfect opportunity to use cloud computing. In “Cloud Opportunity Missed” he writes: “It appears that the voucher system…

US Navy Experiments With Secure Cloud Computing

By G C Network | August 20, 2009

This week in San Diego, CA the US Navy held the initial planning conference for Trident Warrior ’10. The Trident Warrior series is the premier annual FORCEnet Sea Trial Event…

GSA To Present On Cloud Initiative at NCOIC Plenary

By G C Network | August 13, 2009

A General Services Administration (GSA) representative is now scheduled to provide a briefing on the agency’s cloud computing initiative during a “Best Practices for Cloud Initiatives using Storefronts” session on…

FAA CIO Focuses on Cybersecurity

By G C Network | August 12, 2009

During this week Federal Executive Forum, FAA CIO Dave Bowen mentioned protection against software vulnerabilities, wireless intrusion and website vulnerabilities as his top cybersecurity priorities. As the Assistant Administrator for…

DHS Asst. Secretary Addresses Cybersecurity Priorities

By G C Network | August 11, 2009

Greg Schaffer, Assistant Secretary for CyberSecurity & Communications for the US Department of Homeland Security, sees Trusted Internet Connections, EINSTEIN, and front line defense of the nation’s networks as top…

US DoD Chief Security Officer on Cybersecurity Priorities

By G C Network | August 10, 2009

In a Federal Executive Forum interview, Robert Lentz, Chief Security Officer for the US Department of Defense, highlighted the departments cybersecurity priorities. Mr. Lentz is the Deputy Assistant Secretary of…

Twitter Under Denial of Service Attack

By G C Network | August 6, 2009

Multiple sources are reporting that Twitter continues to be under a denial of service attack. Some are speculating that this represents the power of a coordinated bot network attack. For…

NCOIC Holding Full Day Cloud Computing Session

By G C Network | August 5, 2009

The Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC) will be holding a one-day cloud computing session during its plenary meetings, 21-25 September at the Fair Lakes Hyatt in Fairfax, VA. A…

Sevatec a New Player in the Federal Cloud Computing Market

By G C Network | August 3, 2009

Just in time for the new Federal Cloud Computing Storefront, Sevatec, Inc. is announcing the development of a toolkit to help federal agencies transform their enterprise architectures to cloud computing…

GSA Releases Cloud Computing RFQ

By G C Network | July 31, 2009

Following through on a much anticipated action, GSA released their Cloud Computing Request For Quotation (RFQ) today. Cloud computing is a major part of President Obama’s reform effort and this…

(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