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the Free CMSWire NewsletterIf you think competition in the cloud computing market is getting crazy, then you'd better brace yourself, because it's set to get crazier. The White House has outlined its approach to cloud computing for the next year that will see dozens of legacy systems go, as well as a new set of uniform security requirements that contractors will have to meet.
This has been in the works for a long time and many of the bigger cloud computing bruisers have been waiting around to see what they produce before launching a full-scale assault on Washington.
But it's not just the White House or all the bureaucrats up there in Washington that are being targeted; these guidelines affect the entire federal IT infrastructure across all federal agencies, and if you can’t march in step, you’re going to be out of the running for federal contracts.
Cloud Computing in Washington
Microsoft, Oracle and IBM have all been making goo-goo eyes at IT in federal government for a while, and were joined last week by HP, which signed an agreement with Microsoft to provide applications like Office 365 on HP private clouds.
There’s also a lot of smaller deals happening, too, that are bringing smaller companies into the federal orbit through alliances with larger companies like HP again, which also signed a new cloud deal with Box last week.
As a result, the new regulations are going to trickle right down through the cloud space and will become one of the standards that will be applied to security and cloud development, in much the way that DoD 5015.2 has been the standard in records management.
So what exactly is Washington talking about? In a White House blog post by Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel, we get some idea; we also get an idea of what the Feds think about the cloud and what exactly they hope to get out of it.
Federal Cloud Computing Stragegy
In fact, in the first two paragraphs it outlines what it wants out of it, and what it believes is wrong with current legacy systems, which, by the way, are going to get dumped as cloud use evolves, but more of that later.
Van Roekel begins:
In a lean fiscal environment, organizations look for ways to take existing resources and use the latest advances and tools to do the seemingly impossible: improve and expand services while cutting costs. It is no different with the Federal Government."
In fact his “more with less” reference to the relationship between more cloud functionality for less taxpayers dollars just about sums up the whole Federal policy on IT for the future.
He says that by being more rigorous on IT spending this year, the government has saved the taxpayer around US$ 1 billion through Techstat accountability sessions that gave agencies the power to terminate failing projects at an agency level.
And this kind of "efficiency" is to be carried into the cloud computing arena.
Data centers also took a hammering this year, and are likely to get more of the same in the coming year:
We set our sights on data centers — the energy hogs of federal real estate that spread rapidly (and inefficiently) over the last decade. At the end of 2012, the Federal Government will have closed over 472 data centers. And this year we expanded the initiative to include data centers of any size and plan to close nearly 1,000 data centers by the end of 2015."
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