White House CIO speaks at RSA 2011

 February 14, 2011 RSA Conference, Cloud Security Alliance Summit, San Francisco–Vivek Kundra, CIO at the White House described the federal cloud computing strategy in his keynote talk. The challenges and directions for computing in the various government departments have been under review for quite a while. You can see summaries of all the reports at CIO.gov

The primary focus is to change from asset ownership to service provisioning. There is a great need for change because of the many inefficiencies within the various departments. As a basis for comparison, manufacturing companies achieve about 79% server compute resource utilization. In United States, most business servers are operating at about 27% utilization. The government, on the other hand, usually operates at a utilization of about 10%. So the government computers are operating at 50% less utilization than manufacturers get from their computer resources.

One of the goals of the cyber czar, is to reduce the number of data centers. In 1998, the government had 432 data centers. By last year, this number had grown to 2092 data centers, not including functions that had already been moved to the cloud. In the same timeframe, IBM went from 235 data centers down to 12. This government infrastructure, because of its size and complexity, is very difficult to manage.

In the government, takes years to build out capacity and months to provision. All innovations are completely decoupled from what is used in industry and what is the state-of-the-art. All the systems use on premise software, and the overall mentality is to be risk adverse. The function of the CIO is to manage the infrastructure, and not the services. There are no federal applications that are as simple as those in industry. Most of the applications require duplicate and redundant infrastructure.

One ongoing effort is to reduce overall costs. Currently $80 billion is budgeted for information technologies. At least $20 billion of these costs can be moved to the cloud to aggregate demand and allow the government to shut down 800 data centers by 2015. They will tap into existing innovations and change where they are going to spend the money.

The top spenders for IT in the government are DHS and Treasury, both at about $2.5 billion, followed by Department of Defense at $2 billion and the Veterans Administration at $1.8 billion. Some departments like HHS, GSA, and some parts of DOD have already started to move applications to the cloud.

For example HHS has developed a Salesforce.com application that reduces time for funding from one year to three months. This change affects more than 100,000 healthcare practitioners. Other departments have reduced the number of e-mail servers to allow groups within the department to communicate to each other. The Department of Agriculture will be saving $27 million a year by moving 21 separate systems into the cloud.

All of these changes require attention in four major areas. These areas are security, standards, procurement, and governance. As functions and data move into the cloud, security is one of the top concerns. Consolidating data centers and rewriting applications can reduce friction for those who have to work with the government. One challenge is that each agency requires separate certifications. Therefore, one change is to develop a central certification process that can prioritize security contacts and approach real-time response. This integrated identity management will also need to verify that sensitive data is secure.

NIST is working to develop standards for interoperability portability and security and is working with academics and industry to identify those mission-critical requirements. Some of the standards will come from the existing standards organizations, and others will result from technical case studies to determine best of breed, future proof standards. The intent is to quickly develop new standards and not start another 10 year government program of committees and politics.

To improve the procurement process, they are trying to speed up accreditation and moving many functions into the cloud. They hope to eliminate redundant and inefficient vendor certifications. Eventually they want to integrate state and federal needs and eliminate barriers.

And finally for governance, they are working to set policies and budget priorities for the entire government. For the 2012 budget they are making the cloud of heart of the IT expenditures. They also have to consider international aspects in all of these changes. Different governments do not have the same requirements for data sovereignty and other standards as United States. Part of their activities will include developing global frameworks to accommodate migrating functions to the cloud.

The world is seeing an exponential increase in data and the demand for more capabilities to handle this data requires significant changes in the government. They have to work on higher levels of collaboration to address some basic limitations. One would be to get departments to have agency-wide e-mail services and common office productivity tools.

Workflows should be able to display trends especially in the areas of grants management and customer resource management for public facing applications. The goal in infrastructure is to virtualize as much infrastructure as possible. They need to change the way the applications are developed and become better at delivering useful content to the people. They need better capabilities in big data analytics to improve their own business development capabilities.

Security is an overriding concern, but centralizing and integrating security functions across government is also a priority. A centralized identity management capability will enable development of security management services. This is becoming increasingly important as agencies see their workers change to mobile platforms. The changing platform requirements also requires a change from enterprise level software to light weight apps. Overall, government workers have poor access to technology and there is a large gap between what is available to consumers and that available to government workers.