Let's face it, cloud computing is uncharted territory for many organizations. To sort-of paraphrase Winston Churchill, never in the field of computing have so many depended on so few. Enterprises are gradually, and inexorably, turning over significant portions of their infrastructures to outside cloud providers. Lately, there's been talk of consolidation of big cloud providers to a few major providers.
The potential over-reliance on cloud providers is, in fact, making many enterprise CIOs and business leaders nervous. This may be the second round of angst in the cloud maturity cycle, once the first hurdle is passed. For some lessons on what to expect here, look no further than the U.S. federal government's huge web of agencies.
The U.S. federal government took a leadership role early with cloud. In fact, since 2010, federal agencies have been under a mandate to adopt a "cloud-first" approach to setting up new applications. So, there's a lot that can be learned from the experiences of these agencies.
For starters, there's been an innate fear of lock-in to cloud vendors. In fact, 75 percent of federal cloud users in a new survey say they want to move more services to the cloud, but are concerned about retaining control over their data. Additionally, 53 percent say fear of long-term contracts hold them back.
The survey of 150 managers, conducted by MeriTalk, a agency management social network and consortium, finds that cloud is making some headway within the highest reaches of government. Pushed by cloud first and bolstered by FedRAMP, the governments' cloud service procurement initiatives, agency managers are testing the waters. Nineteen percent say they deliver more than one-quarter of their agency’s IT services fully or partially via cloud.
Some services are moving faster than others. Predictably, email is first – 50 percent of those who have implemented cloud say they have moved
email. Additionally, 45 percent report they have moved Web hosting, and 43 percent have migrated servers/storage. Fewer have migrated
middleware/development tools (19 percent), ERP solutions (26 percent), and disaster recovery (31 percent), among others.
There's still a lot of work to be done, and better ways need to be established to determine the benefits being gained. Sixty-five percent reported they are not completing a workload analysis to define the data/services/workloads to migrate to the cloud or centralizing IT governance; and 60 percent are not developing a cost model.
The survey also finds data integration and portability issues are also top of mind. Fifty-eight percent of federal agency executives say cloud/legacy system integration is a barrier to further migration, 57 percent cite the inability to move data from existing legacy systems to the cloud, and 54 percent cite concerns with moving data once it is in the cloud.
Government agencies are well-known for the older systems (some circa 1985) they keep patching up and running -- so it's no surprise that integration issues are hampering cloud efforts. Of course, many agencies have extremely sensitive data, so this is another obstacle. In the MeriTalk survey, agencies estimate that 32 percent of their data cannot be moved to the cloud due to security or data sovereignty issues and almost a quarter of agencies – 23 percent – are not comfortable passing sensitive Federal data to even FedRAMP-certified cloud providers.
It appears that government cloud efforts are delivering big-time benefits in one area at least -- cost savings. According to estimates from Matthew Goodrich, the FedRAMP director at the General Services Administration -- noted in an interview with CIO's Kenneth Corbin -- the use of FedRAMP services has resulted in savings of at least $40 million over the past two years. Yes, barely a dent in an $80-billion-a-year IT organization, but progress in the right direction nonetheless.
This positive outlook was reflected in the MeriTalk survey, with 53 percent of the federal agency managers rating their cloud experiences as
"very successful."
The remedy here is to become involved with user groups of consortia (such as FedRAMP) to compare notes, share experiences, and apply group power to hold vendors' feet to the fire. Plus, it pays to work intimately with cloud vendors --the best way to keep control over the management of one's data and systems is through a strong working relationship The federal managers in the MeriTalk survey also provide some additional advice for achieving success in the cloud:
Start small: Federal agencies have found success in the cloud by first migrating services with fewer security/privacy concerns and less
reliability/operational risk. Build a model for success.
Ensure a fit with cloud providers: Every organization has unique needs. Ensure the cloud provider can integrate cloud data with legacy systems
Consider open options: Since it's fear of commitment that holds organizations back from further cloud adoption, it's helpful to adopt systems that can be easily swapped, substituted or migrated. Explore solutions that deliver long-term flexibility.
