Guest Blog: Sequestration and the Cloud

May 30, 2013 / G C Network /

Twitter Feed

Animoto = Automated Imagery PED

By G C Network | December 3, 2008

Over the past two days, I’ve spent quite a bit of time with Stevie Clifton, Co-founder & CTO of Animoto. Besides being one of the coolest things I’ve seen in…

World Summit of Cloud Computing 2008

By G C Network | December 1, 2008

Video by Animoto using cloud computing technology. (Done in 20 minutes for free)!! Follow me at https://Twitter.com/Kevin_Jackson

2008 World Summit of Cloud Computing

By G C Network | November 30, 2008

After a uneventful trip , I’m now in Israel for the World Summit. With over 500 people expected to attend, it promises to be an exciting time. Unfortunately, I arrived…

CloudCamp Federal ’08

By G C Network | November 28, 2008

| Get your Presentation Pack Follow me at https://Twitter.com/Kevin_Jackson

NCOIC Cloud Working Group

By G C Network | November 26, 2008

The NCOIC will be holding a cloud computing working group on December 10th during plenary session in Costa Mesa, CA. The session focus will be “Requirements for Enterprise Cloud Computing”.…

According to Cloud Computing Journal, and Red Herring, IBM will now rate other cloud providers. Using the “Resilient Cloud Validation” program, IBM will validate their facilities, applications, data, staff, processes…

Cloud Computing vs. Cloud Services

By G C Network | November 24, 2008

In September, Frank Gens provided an excellent overview of the the new “Cloud Computing Era”. In preparing for an upcoming talk, I re-read the post and found myself appreciating it…

Inaugural “Inside the Cloud” Survey

By G C Network | November 21, 2008

Appistry and CloudCamp recently released results from the first “Inside the Cloud” survey. Key takeaways were: Amazon perceived as cloud leader, with twice as many votes as Google Infrastructure providers…

FIAC Presentation Mentions Cloud Computing

By G C Network | November 20, 2008

At the recent Federal Information Assurance Conference, Bob Gourley, CTO Crucial Point LLC, and former Defense Intelligence Agency CTO, recently provided his views on the state of Federal IT. His cloud…

Sun Cloud Czar

By G C Network | November 19, 2008

Earlier this week it was announced that, Sun, Senior Vice President, Dave Douglas, was appointed to lead the Company’s cloud computing efforts. A JDJ Article also stated that, in addition to becoming Sun’s…

« Previous
1
…
53
54
55
56
57
…
73
Next »

(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.

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

Posted in Uncategorized

G C Network

5 Comments

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
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).
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
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
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 .