Doug Bourgeois - VP, Chief Cloud Executive, VMware Federal
The cloud first policy requires Federal Agencies to migrate 3 IT services to the cloud within 18 months and the first must be migrated within 12 months. As yet another unfunded mandate, accomplishing the objectives will be challenging for most Agencies. Shifting to a different service model is likely to require some investment. Yet, at the same time, Federal Agencies are facing a substantial budget crunch. Something’s gotta give. At this point, there is enough empirical evidence for most to agree that the cloud offers two substantial benefits – cost reduction and agility. So, the challenge will be for Agencies to muster the resources and focus to make it over the initial bumps in the road.
Certain workloads seem to be popping up as likely initial candidates to meet the cloud first mandate. Recent announcements could be an early indication that email may be one of the first services to see widespread cloud adoption. That, of course, will depend upon the success of early efforts. Other candidates seem to include collaboration, disaster recovery, and web hosting. While the benefits of consuming these services in a cloud computing model would be real and achievable, limiting the cloud to only these would leave gobs of money and agility on the table.
The cloud is not a destination. Rather it is a way of doing business. More specifically, it is a technology architecture that enables IT to be delivered and consumed as a service. As such, there are other services that, if consumed from the cloud, would provide significant financial and agility benefits. Two examples are data center consolidation and telework. Virtualization within data centers as an initial consolidation step reduces the complexity and sheer volume of physical resources to relocate. It also provides a foundation for federation, which provides a substantial amount of agility to move workloads between data center locations. Virtualization also provides centralized control and increased security from a virtual desktop infrastructure (we haven’t forgotten wikileaks already have we?). In addition, virtual desktops provide a much improved approach to business continuity while also lowering operating costs.
My point is simply this: virtualization provides a necessary and solid foundation for a cloud computing model. There are many more benefits to be realized than what the cloud first mandate will bring alone. To achieve these benefits, Agencies will have to expand their thinking beyond merely checking the box to enabling a flexible, adaptable, and efficient infrastructure.
There is no doubt that the cloud first policy and the 25 point plan will encourage Federal Agencies to adopt a cloud computing model. The question is this: will it be enough?
