Mr. Kundra (Fed. CIO), The Gov doesn’t need to re invent the wheel or marriage the Devil to targets federal adoption of Cloud Computing infrastructure
written by gunther gerlach-2009
As you saw during the “Cloud shoot out” celebrated in Washington D.C., most of the attendees were third party technology vendors trying to get part of the $21 Billion budgeted to this transition.
Government goals: They are simple, decrease capital costs and streamline IT infrastructures. While keeping absolute control over security, privacy and trust.
The Government has today more than 1,000 Data centers (according to Susie Adams, the federal chief technology officer at Microsoft), more than twice than a couple of years ago. So, the Government’s needs are not only reducing cost, but also support this amazing growth in the next few years… Is some one taking in consideration “sustainability” and “scalability”. So, if the number of Data-Centers has grew more than double in the past few years, and we are expecting the implementation of many new Government indicatives, like the “Medical record” and many others, the target shouldn’t be decrease capital but increasing performance, scalability, availability, with the current infrastructure.
1,000 Data centers… such magnificent infrastructure could be used to implement the most powerful and robust hybrid Cloud environment, able to escalate from private to public clouds when is needed and, providing a geographically distributed environment able to compete with Amazon EC2 and others. Forget about Public cloud v. Private cloud, a hybrid cloud would allow the Government to store critical data in a private environment while applications and solutions will live I the public cloud.
Quick solution: instead of buying services from third party vendors and marry the devil, it would be easier just to acquire the technology that companies like Amazon already developed and tested in extreme environment, where transactions grow from thousands to million in an hour and, from one continent to another. The amazing flexibility of Amazon technology will allow the government to offer an unlimited potential for any future initiative.
