Jim Kaskade

I was just reading about how the Fed (with the vision led by Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra) is creating an important new mechanism for granting government-wide approval for agency cloud computing applications that can then be adopted by other agencies. You can read the whole article here, and see details of the government’s plans here, and a presentation from Vivek Kundra here.

What I couldn’t help but think is that the Government (the Fed), will most likely be deploying a federated cloud architecture. Yeap, the Fed will deploy Federated Cloud. What this means is that it will most likely be a hybrid of on-premise virtualized infrastructure coupled with off-premise virtualized infrastructure…..or private and public cloud.

Is the Fed a “real” opportunity?

Or is it just more hype? Well, that’s what got me to thinking. I’ve been talking to many analysts lately on this very topic. “Who’s going to jump into this Cloud game the most, first?” I asked IDC and Gartner this question. Well, to my surprise they said “Government”.

Courtesy of IDC, the following chart depicts the ideal Cloud targets. From what I understand, there are some detailed reports coming out soon about specific Cloud IT spend by vertical. So stay tuned. But for now, as a provider of Cloud service automation software, I’m following this industry vertical roadmap.

When I read the following, I couldn’t help but chuckle a little.

“The intent of the board is not take away authority from agencies, but to enable them,” Mell, [a senior computer scientist with NIST] said. It would do that by identifying and reviewing cloud computing processes and applications submitted by sponsoring agencies. Once they’ve been authorized, they can be used as building blocks for other agencies, letting them focus on incremental applications, Mell said. It would still be up to agencies to choose whether to use the approved applications.

Yeah right. When you can save two-thirds of your spend on things like email by pushing that IT service into the cloud, this organization was put together to bypass the typical delays associated with governmental agencies. “Step aside, we need to speed up the pace here dammit!”.