"The challenge we have -- already I can see it -- 3, 5 or 8 years from now we're going to be talking about cloud services consolidation if we don't approach this the right way," said Kenneth Rogers, director of the State Department's IT strategic planning office.
It is important to take a calculated approach to cloud first, Rogers said while speaking Sept. 22 at an AFCEA Bethesda event. The State Department is currently formulating a white paper that will lay out its cloud strategy.
Lisa Schlosser, deputy administrator of e-government and information technology at the Office of Management and Budget, told event attendees to expect a shift in messaging from OMB. "The goal is to optimize resources--hardware, software, people, energy. So, it's about optimization not just about shutting down," she said.
The State Department's data center consolidation efforts have been underway for 3 years, but Rogers said its prominence in OMB's 25-point plan to reform federal information technology gave his effort more credibility and allowed him to push the initiative forward.
"Frankly most of the bureaus are not really interested in handing over their servers and platforms to a centralized service," said Rogers. "The problem, when you centralize IT services, is our budget process."
As the State Department centralizes services it aggregates portions of the budget from other places, but when a bureau gets billed, it's possible the cost is higher than what the component paid prior to consolidation, said Rogers. This sometimes frustrating process requires IT leaders to make apparent true cost of ownership, he added.
"That requires a tremendous amount of communication and transparency in the process of making these things successful," said Rogers.
As agencies continue to move programs to the cloud in 2012, Bajinder Paul, deputy associate administrator of the General Services Administration's office of citizen services and innovative technologies, predicted that defining service level agreements will be the biggest challenge. Agencies have to be managing SLAs smarter, he said.
GSA's SLA for hosting USA.gov, for example, requires more "elasticity" to account for increased web traffic that could occur during a major disaster or emergency, said Paul.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Molly Bernhart Walker
Quelle/Source: Fierce Government IT, 22.09.2011
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