US Federal CIO Cloud Computing Summit

[Reuven Cohen]

Interesting developments over the last couple days in regards to Cloud
Computing within the US Federal Government. I have had the honor of
being invited to Washington DC next week to attend the US Federal
Government Cloud Computing Summit. The summit is being hosted by the
US government's first CIO, Vivek Kundra. The purpose of this invite
only meeting is to provide a forum to discuss the opportunities and
challenges to implementing cloud computing solutions with-in the
federal government.

Recently President Obama has set a directive that the government be
innovative and collaborative, the Federal Chief Information Officers
Council (CIOC) has established an initiative to explore the
application of cloud computing to federal activities. What is becoming
clear is cloud computing will play a very important aspect in the US
Federal Government's forthcoming IT strategy. As part of this
strategy, the CIOC has created a Federal Government’s Working Group on
Cloud Computing. The purpose of this event is to solicit information
and advice from the private sector on the issues facing the Federal
government as it seeks to take advantage of cloud computing
technologies.

The American Council for Technology (ACT), a non-profit public-private
organization established to help government use IT, has been asked to
host the meeting with leading private sector companies involved with
cloud computing. The meeting will be held on May 6, 2009 in
Washington, DC.

My goal is lobby for a greater cloud centric interoperability mandate
from the federal government as well as increased co-operation between
the federal government IT organization and the cloud industry,
although this meeting itself is a huge step forward.

During the cloud summit I will make sure to mention the following key
Issues for cloud computing with in the Federal government.

1. Security & Privacy
2. Data and Application Interoperability & Compatibility
3. Data and Application Portability
4. Governance and Management (IT Cloud Policy)
5. Metering, Monitoring & scaling
6. Mobile Access concerns

If anyone has any points they would like to me raise during the
summit, please let me know.

I'll post more details in the coming days including a full overview
after the summit.

Reuven
CCIF Instigator.

[l...@aero.org]

Reuven,

A key cloud issue for the US Federal Government (and probably others)
is public vs. private clouds. Many federal organizations that run their
own data centers and infrastructure will want to, at least initially, stand up
their own cloud. This raises issues for economy of scale and also
portability and interoperability since while everyone is talking about
cloud standards -- and important work is getting started in earnest --
they are simply not in place yet with wide adoption.

A second issue is SLAs and performance/behavior management, in general.
Public clouds tend to be general hosting environments, whereas owners
of a private cloud may be tempted/required to configure and tune for
a particular
job mix and workload. How much of this is abstracted away or exposed
in the APIs remains to be seen. Which segments of the marketplace
will have critical mass for demanding simplicity vs. control remains
to be seen.

Also be sure to mention the July 15 workshop at the OMG mtg, in Arlington.

In any case, I am sure you will be a fine spokesman for our community! ;->

--Craig

[Alexis Richardson]

Ruv,

At the last CloudCamp London someone came up with this idea about
government clouds: That they could make their data and processing
power available to citizens.

Consider DATA:

Imagine being able to build a cloud app that could easily access
valuable publicly owned data. Think about what this would mean for
transparency and integrity of activities funded by the taxpayer. And
no longer would people have to expect Google to be the sole
information utility, with all the fears that entails.

Amazon does this with "public data sets", but this would be available
FREE to (in the words of a friend of mine) "taxpayers who have
realised that getting the government to give you large amounts of data
isn't much use without somewhere to process it".

Just a thought - on something the US and other governments could actually DO.

alexis

On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 7:24 PM, <l...@aero.org> wrote:
>
>
> Reuven,
>
> A key cloud issue for the US Federal Government (and probably others)
> is public vs. private clouds.  Many federal organizations that run their
> own data centers and infrastructure will want to, at least initially, stand up
> their own cloud.  This raises issues for economy of scale and also
> portability and interoperability since while everyone is talking about
> cloud standards -- and important work is getting started in earnest --
> they are simply not in place yet with wide adoption.
>
> A second issue is SLAs and performance/behavior management, in general.
> Public clouds tend to be general hosting environments, whereas owners
> of a private cloud may be tempted/required to configure and tune for
> a particular
> job mix and workload.  How much of this is abstracted away or exposed
> in the APIs remains to be seen.  Which segments of the marketplace
> will have critical mass for demanding simplicity vs. control remains
> to be seen.
>
> Also be sure to mention the July 15 workshop at the OMG mtg, in Arlington.
>
> In any case, I am sure you will be a fine spokesman for our community! ;->
>
> --Craig
>
>
>
> At 11:23 AM -0400 4/30/09, Reuven Cohen wrote:

[Michael Crandell]

Hi all:

Just wanted to mention that RightScale was invited to the Summit too, and

I'll be following your feedback on this forum to take it there along with Reuven.

We'll continue to push not only for openness and interoperability, but for the

government to begin to take advantage of the cloud NOW.  While there are

certainly many aspects and issues still to be resolved, there is huge benefit 

to be gained in cost savings, agility, etc. today.

See you there, Ruv.

Michael

Michael Crandell

CEO - RightScale

mic...@rightscale.com

[G. Hussain Chinoy]

Reuven,

Sounds exciting... Definitely looking forward to hearing what was discussed. 

The private/public cloud issue is definitely important - where's the data and who has (or can have) access to it?  Security in that respect, but definitely with regards to the personally identifiable information (PII) that the cloud may contain.  Recall the incident where a VA contractor lost their laptop and exposed a bunch of Veterans data?  Protecting from a "cloud-scaled" event of that type is paramount.  

Can clouds scale to the level that the government would expect?  Amazon's EC2 service appears to have been set up for small-to-medium businesses, and not enterprise scale businesses - Not that they aren't trying to get there, but for the federal government (which is probably the same concern for larger corporate environments), the SLA's around cloud computing seem not to be there just yet.

Controls around the cloud IaaS / SaaS environments are also needed - the government has many different standards bodies, such as NIST (NIST 800-53's a representative controls document to peek at) - what amount of visibility and oversight can cloud providers or cloud interoperability standards provide to enable these required controls.  Being able to audit the stewardship of the data is a big onus of the government.

I'd like to hear what sort of various scenarios where cloud computing would be used and what would be the scenarios for maximum ROI to the government - "cloud burst" for scalability, IaaS, SaaS, etc.  Is there a good low bar that government could use to show the benefits of the cloud.  (I'd think a perfect storm would be the public data push Kundra and Obama are highlighting with recovery.gov and data.gov - since that data's expected to be public and shouldn't necessarily have extensive regulatory control expectations.)

I've fielded a lot of these questions as a contractor and look forward to a wider discussion of these issues.

Thanks!

H

[Alexis Richardson]

Sorry folks, this one I cannot resist in the light of our previous debates.

I propose "Government as a Service" or GaaS. In "the gas cloud", hot
air is all we need, provided we all talk at once ;-)

Ahem..

Anyway. I really do hope this Summit goes well.

alexis

[Bert Armijo]

To the best of my knowledge, the following companies will also be represented next week. Look forward to seeing you there.

 

3tera

Akamai

Cassat

Dell

Gogrid

HP

IBM

LayeredTech

Rackspace

SeverVault

Sun

[Reuven Cohen]

From what I've been told 20 companies have been selected - 10 in the
morning session (9am - 12pm) and 10 in the afternoon session.
Regardless, I am honored to have been included.

FYI, I'm getting into DC on Tuesday if anyone wants to meetup before hand.

Reuven

[Michael Crandell]

LOL!

[Bob Marcus]

FYI: There will be a Cloud Standards Summit on July 15 in Arlington, Va to respond to the concerns of the Federal CIO Council Cloud Working Group.
http://www.omg.org/news/meetings/GOV-WS/css/index.htm   All of the leading standards groups will be participating. Hopefully Reuven will be able to report back in his talk at the Summit on the Federal CIO WG feedback to his key issues.

 

A preliminary mapping of Cloud Issues to Standards Group activities is at http://tinyurl.com/cyct5c

 

Bob Marcus

=====================================