Have you heard of the Technology CEO Council? Neither had I until recently. The council is made up of a strange mix of tech CEOs from organizations including Applied Materials, , , IBM, Intel, Micron, and Motorola. Why this group and not Adobe, Cisco, HP, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, Oracle, and Symantec? Beats me.
Anyway, the group published a paper in early October called, “One Trillion Reasons: How Commercial Best Practices to Maximize Productivity Can Save Taxpayer Money and Enhance Government Services.” The paper stresses the need to reduce federal spending and suggests some IT initiatives in support of this objective. The initiatives include:
The paper is available at www.techceocouncil.org.
I agree with the spirit of this paper as there are plenty of ways to use IT costs savings to reduce overall federal spending. That said, the paper is pretty weak and self-serving. Specifically:
The CEOs also need to remember that their own internal IT organizations are far different than those in the federal government. When EMC executives mandate a massive VMware project, all of IT jumps into formation. It doesn’t work that way in the public sector.
There were certainly some good points in the paper, but overall it is really a marketing piece put out by a lobbying organization. In my humble opinion, there is some irony in this paper and organization–while the Technology CEO Council puts out a paper about how the federal government can save money on IT, companies like Dell, EMC, IBM, and Intel are happily wasting dough on a half-baked lobbying/PR organization. Funny world.
Tags: Applied Material, CIA, Cloud Computing, data center consolidation, Dell, DHS, DISA, EMC, Federal Enterprise Architecture, FedRAMP, FISMA, IBM, Intel, Klinger-Cohen Act, Micron, Motorola, NASA, Technology CEO Council, Vivek Kundra Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Yesterday, I hosted a panel at the Cloud Computing summit focused on cloud security for the federal government. The panel was made up of some smart folks: Alex Hart from VMware, Bob Wambach from , and one of the primary authors of the Cloud Security Alliance guidelines, Chris Hoff from Cisco.
While these folks offered great contributions, most questions were focused on the fourth member of the panel, Peter Mell from NIST, the chair of the Federal Cloud Computing Advisory Council. Why? Let’s just say that Mell may be the single individual most focused on cloud security in the world. He has been tasked with defining cloud computing standards for the entire federal government–a big responsibility since President Obama and Federal CIO Vivek Kundra continue to trumpet the benefits of cloud computing and push federal agencies to adopt pilot projects.
Mell’s work will soon come to fruition when the feds introduce the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Pilot program (FedRAMP). FedRAMP has two primary goals:
Since FedRAMP is still a work in progress, the audience made up of federal IT people had a lot of questions about all of the fine points. Thus Mell was in the hot seat for most of the time.
Peter Mell deserves a lot of credit. Federal agencies have often acted independently with regard to IT, so Mell and his team are herding cats.
If FedRAMP works, cloud service providers can deliver to a single set of standards. This will encourage innovation and bolster competition. On the agency side, FedRAMP could pave the way for a wave of cloud computing consumption over the next few years. What happens if FedRAMP fails? The federal government becomes difficult to service, so most cloud service providers treat it as a market niche. If that happens, the federal government could lose its cloud computing leadership and momentum very, very quickly.
Tags: Cisco Systems, EMC, FedRAMP, NIST, Peter Mell, President Obama, Vivek Kundra, VMware Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
I’m in Washington co-chairing a Cloud Computing summit along with my colleague Mark Bowker. Thus far, we’ve covered cloud computing drivers, virtualization, cloud computing governance/compliance, and new skill sets needed for the cloud.
The audience is made up of federal IT workers, for the most part. These folks are under the gun since the Obama administration is pushing cloud projects and setting aside budget dollars to persuade federal agencies to get on board with proof-of-concept efforts. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has added fuel to the fire, acting as the poster child for federal cloud computing as a way to save taxpayer money and improve IT service.
The federal audience is certainly hungry for knowledge, but very leery about the cloud in general. The feedback today indicates that:
Federal IT people really want more basic information and education about the cloud; vendors should note this and ramp up their knowledge transfer capabilities. Furthermore, it is important to talk in federal terms like FISMA and NIST rather than a more generic presentation. Think security and governance from the get-go.
Finally, the feds are really afraid of vendor lock-in, so standards are important here. When and if the federal government agrees upon cloud standards, vendors must go along to get along. If the feds fail to agree upon standards, all bets are off and the federal cloud becomes a big free-for-all. The private sector, public sector, and technology industry should all work together to make sure that this won’t happen.
Tags: Cloud Computing, FISMA, NIST, Vivek Kundra Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
There is a tremendous amount of IT thought leadership taking place in Washington DC that few people in the private sector are aware of. Case in point, the Brookings Institute hosted a policy forum to discuss the economic benefits of cloud computing. Participants in this event included Federal CIO Vivek Kundra and others.
Darrell M. West, Vice President and Director at the Brookings Institute, presented the findings of an internal research study investigating the savings achieved by various government organizations that adopted cloud computing. Based upon this research, Brookings believes that by moving applications or IT infrastructure to the cloud, government organizations can save between 25% and 50% using cloud resources instead of relying on homegrown IT efforts.
Videos from the event as well as the final report are available at this URL:
http://www.brookings.edu/events/2010/0407_cloud_computing.aspx
My take-aways:
Tags: Brookings Institute, City of Los Angeles, cloud, Darrell M. West, Vivek Kundra Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
While we in Boston had very little natural snow, Washington DC had a record year. Three storms dropped 32″ of snow on our nation’s capital. This led to a federal government shutdown for 3 days–costing an estimated $100 million per day.
You’d think that the impact of this shutdown would be addressed somewhat by the fed’s liberal teleworking policies. According to a 2009 report titled “Status of Telework in the Federal Government, Report to Congress,” 78 agencies reported that nearly 9% of eligible workers reported as teleworkers in 2008. What’s more, 61% of agencies reported a net increase in the teleworker population as well.
While these statistics look impressive, many reports from DC during the snowstorm indicated a different situation. It turns out that many federal workers were stuck at home without a teleworking option. Some workers report that their superiors discourage teleworking as a general rule, assuming that workers will not be productive. There were also a lot of technical problems reported as well. In general, the snowstorm seemed to expose that the federal teleworking execution is little more than a paper tiger.
So is teleworking a good or a bad thing? While the research varies, many studies point to productivity benefits from teleworking. The State of Maryland Department of Transportation reported a 27% productivity increase from teleworkers. Cisco Systems found similar results: in a study of 2000 teleworking employees, Cisco found that 69% reported higher productivity, 75% said that the timeliness of their work improved, and 80% reported that teleworking improved their quality of life.
As a veteran IT person, I’m shocked by this news. The feds talk a good teleworking game but if these anecdotes are true, they are talking the talk but not walking the walk. Heck, I even read a note from someone who works at the Dept. of Energy who claims that DOE–the agency that is supposed to help us break our dependence on foreign oil–is extremely tight on teleworking. This is certainly ironic, but also pretty sad. Note to Federal CIO Vivek Kundra: if these stories are true, your biggest obstacle may be culture rather than technology.
With record budget deficits, we need the feds to save money anyway they can. Teleworking can and should be part of the solution. If the teleworking situation is as bad as many workers report, we need to figure out the problems and pose a solution ASAP. With the technology options available today, we can’t let outdated attitudes or technology paranoia stifle productivity, employee quality of life, or green-friendly policies.
Tags: Cisco Systems, Federal Government, teleworking, Vivek Kundra Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Cisco (CSCO), NetApp (NTAP), and VMware (VMW) made an interesting announcement this week. The three amigos teamed up to deliver secure multi-tenancy in a virtual infrastructure.
What does this mean? In large organizations, it means that IT can enable different functional departments or business applications to share server, networking, and storage infrastructure securely. The same is true for service providers that can now provide secure server, network, and storage partitions across shared hardware.
Obviously, shared hardware means greater utilization and efficiency along with equipment, operations, and utilities cost savings. In the past, security was the wrench in the works — would Citigroup really want to host applications on the same server hardware as Bank of America? Secure multi-tenancy may not solve all the cultural and IT problems, but it goes a long way toward doing so. Large organizations will be especially pleased –I can only imagine that Federal CIO Vivek Kundra and the GSA will be all over this announcement.
The three companies each contribute their own technology to make secure multi-tenancy work: VMware provides vShield Zones, Cisco offers VN-Link, and NetApp chips in MultiStore. I imagine you can manage all three through vCenter, but I’m not certain.
This is a very good start, but I can imagine more integration in the future. For example, I can envision a PKI infrastructure anchoring virtual infrastructure and cloud computing for authentication and secure multi-tenancy services. This would be especially useful for military and intelligence applications.
We’ll see what happens, but in the meantime, kudos to Cisco, NetApp, and VMware for addressing a real “gotcha” holding back future computing benefits.
Tags: Cisco Systems, Federal Government, GSA, NetApp, Vivek Kundra, VMware Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Yesterday, Cisco, EMC, and VMware unveiled the next iteration of their partnership. Together, the three will offer common support, professional services (through their joint venture, Alpine), and an integrated server, networking, and storage hardware offering called Vblocks. The companies will also work together on service and support.
During the announcement, all three participants highlighted the fact that Vblocks were really targeted at “private clouds.” In other words, a sort of turnkey cloud infrastructure to be consumed by a single organization.
Hmm. So some Fortune 500 company is going to buy a single hardware and hypervisor stack from these guys and replace all kinds of other servers, storage, networking, management tools, etc? Perhaps, but this seems like a stretch to me as this simply isn’t the way IT consumes products. That said, I believe that Cisco, EMC, and VMware could be very successful with Vblocks and its other new initiatives in the broad public sector space because:
* The Federal government is ga-ga over cloud computing. Since early this year, we’ve seen the feds allocate money for cloud initiatives, propose that GSA offer cloud services, and task NIST with developing cloud standards. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra can’t speak often enough about cloud computing’s potential. Sensing an emerging trend, many federal integrators like Lockheed-Martin, SAIC, and Unisys are building their own clouds believing that Federal agencies will soon buy capacity and services. Cisco, EMC, and VMware should be all over every cloud effort inside the beltway.
* Governments are modernizing IT. Federal, state, and local governments are actively consolidating data centers, replacing legacy systems, and adopting virtualization technology as a foundation. Case-in-point, the Commonwealth of MA released its, “IT Strategy for the Commonwealth 2009-2011″ plan in 2008. The plan calls for the Commonwealth to create, “a robust, agile enterprise IT architecture, shared services and applications, and common, effective management practices.” As part of this, MA will consolidate down to 2 data centers, one of these will be a brand new facility in Holyoke. Seems to me that a massive and somewhat green-field opportunity is a perfect target for Vblocks.
* Governments are already onboard. Kundra already selected Google Apps for Washington DC at his previous job and just last week the City of Los Angeles decided to abandon its own email system in favor of Gmail. These aren’t pure play government cloud computing efforts but they do represent a growing trend. It is likely that more and more service providers will develop specific SAAS applications for the public sector and they will need servers, networks, storage, and virtualization when they do.
The common theme here is that net-new infrastructure presents the biggest short term opportunity for Cisco, EMC, and VMware and that a lot of this activity is occurring in the public sector. This trend will only accelerate as more stimulus dollars flow to IT projects and/or some type of healthcare reform legislation gets passed.
Cisco, EMC, and VMware are leading enterprise companies but so are competitors like HP and IBM. What’s more, technology migration is always ugly. Yes, these three must enter these knife fights together but a public-sector push may be more fruitful while the private sector sorts out this whole nebulous cloud thing over time.
Tags: Cisco Systems, Cloud Computing, EMC, Federal Government, Google, GSA, HP, IBM, Los Angeles, NIST, Vivek Kundra, VMware Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
On a recent trip to Washington DC, I met with a number of IT professionals working for the Federal government. I made sure to ask each person I met what he or she thought of Federal CIO Vivek Kundra. Kundra was appointed to this role by President Obama in March 2009.
Based upon this unscientific and small sample, I’d say that opinions are extremely binary. It’s not quite a “love him or hate him,” scenario but pretty close.
Those in favor of Kundra like the fact that he has brought a personality and visibility to Federal IT. Kundra certainly has gotten his fair share of publicity. He’ll be speaking at a CIO conference at the University of MD and at a Tech conference in NYC soon. This exposure is reassuring to the very talented Federal IT population that isn’t well understood outside of the Beltway. Kundra also gets kudos for some of his work on things like data.gov and his discussions on cloud computing.
While Kundra’s detractors recognize these accomplishments, but they feel that he is somewhat of an empty suit who seems more in tune with Silicon Valley than the IT efforts in DC. What’s more, many people point out that while Kundra has a CIO title, he acts and speaks more like a CTO. For example, all his talk about cloud computing is simply a better way to deploy IT infrastructure. Critics wonder when Kundra will focus on CIO topics like IT as a means to enhance business functions and connect better with citizens and the public sector.
Kundra’s predecessor, Karen Evans, wasn’t the most charismatic person in DC, but she did move the ball forward on things like e-government, the Federal Enterprise Architecture, and FISMA.
In my humble opinion, the jury is still out on Mr. Kundra. The attention is great but no one really understand what the heck cloud computing is. ESG data also indicates that the next IT transition will proceed slowly. While cloud computing matures, there are an awful lot of smart people who would like to see Kundra focus on the business of IT rather than blue sky, Sand Hill Rd. rhetoric.
Tags: Barack Obama, Cybersecurity, Federal Government, Vivek Kundra Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
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