Couple of weeks ago Vivek Kundra

A couple of weeks ago Vivek Kundra, US Chief Information Officer, released the "Federal Cloud Computing Strategy" paper. In spite of its to put it more exactly bland title and innocuous language, the paper carries the potential to transform the government's use of research -- and, by extension and example, the private sector's as then.

Second, it implies the scope of underutilized and inefficiently applied IT resources within the government today. As the report notes later in its pages, to put it more exactly than being "The Fortune One," as people pointing to the size of the Federal IT budget sometime characterize it, the Federal government, with respect to IT procurement, acts more like an agglomeration of much smaller businesses. One case study contained in the report, detailing an email outsourcing initiative within the Department of Agriculture, noted it had 21 different email systems. Along with 21 different infrastructures, operations staffs, vendor contracts, to cut a long story short on. The potential for improving efficiency is enormous.

By aggregating demand and standardizing offerings, the report predicts that utilization rates will increase from less than 30% to over 70%, matching what commercial cloud providers achieve. In terms of the level of impact this would have, the report states that in 2010, around 30 cents of every dollar invested in Federal IT was spent on data center infrastructure. The report predicts that by shifting to cloud computing, the Federal government can reduce its data center expenditure by 30%. I think that implies the government can save $7.2 billion of its IT budget.

The report discusses potential cloud benefits

The report discusses potential cloud benefits, defining them in three categories: efficiency, agility, and technology. I found one technology benefit fascinating: cloud computing, the report suggests, will help IT "shift focus from asset ownership to service management."

In my last blog posting, I wrote about wasting IT resources to achieve business benefit. This approaches offends traditional asset managers, as it seems to imply that assets are unimportant. And, in truth, this is correct. When a service management perspective is in place, the focus is on the benefit derived by the user, not the motivation of the provider. The pressure is on the provider to meet the service management bogey, at the appropriate price. And with regard to the service provider's perspective, it at that time becomes a question of where the necessary assets of sufficient quality to enable meeting the service SLA are available, with, again, an indifference to asset ownership. The report's moderate tone underplays the revolutionary impact on shifting focus from asset ownership to service delivery.

The report presents the NIST Risk Management Framework as a suggested approach to evaluating security for a cloud-based application. What was most interesting in the commentary on cloud computing security was a description of potential security benefits available by using a cloud hosting infrastructure.

What I've described are just a few of the interesting highlights of the report. As is the nature of many government publications, its flat prose downplays the critical implications of the content. It's quite clear that the Federal government is preparing for a huge commitment to cloud computing on all fronts: external SaaS, internally-hosted IaaS, and external public IaaS as so then. With its announced "cloud-first" policy, the Federal government is making cloud computing its default deployment option.

Bernard Golden is CEO of consulting firm HyperStratus, which specializes in virtualization, cloud computing and related issues. He is as well the author of "Virtualization for Dummies," the best-selling book on virtualization to date.