Feds going to the cloud

First-ever cloud advocacy in new federal budget request

“Adoption of a cloud computing model is a major part of the strategy to achieve efficient and effective IT.”

                - Budget of the U.S. Government, Fiscal year 2011 [1]

And with that, the U.S. federal government puts a stake in the ground, acknowledging for the first time ever that cloud computing is a central component of their strategy for improving the IT performance of the federal enterprise. The budget goes on to say that the “new approach will redesign IT in key business areas from the ground up, based on the concept of central Federal platforms designed to streamline processes and modernize information technology services.”

This is obviously a large vote of confidence for an industry that has only recently stopped moving from acronym to acronym, finally settling in on a few standard monikers for what we do. In Brivo’s ten-year history with this computing paradigm, we’ve seen early labels such as ASP (Application Service Provider) and MSP (Managed Service Provider) give way to SaaS (Software as a Service) and now the more generalized “cloud” term. The one thing that has remained constant across all of those changes is that the motivation for centralizing computing resources is still the same: better service at a lower overall cost of ownership, which is what the federal budget IT folks are trying to achieve.

It wasn’t an easy move for federal IT leadership to give such a blanket endorsement of this new technology, given all the perceptions to be overcome regarding potential information security issues in cloud computing. The current state of this discussion, as Imperial Capital’s Jeff Kessler notes in his March, 2010 Security Industry Monitor, is that “enterprises need assurance that sensitive data can be protected in the cloud and that security can meet corporate governance and regulatory requirements.” [2]

Many expect that in the case of the federal government, this security concern will translate into the use of private clouds dedicated to federal clients, rather than public clouds shared with all comers. In this context, it is worth repeating Federal CIO Vivek Kundra’s observation that “when you look at security, it's easier to secure when you concentrate things than when you distribute them across the government.” [3]

And there’s also a green angle to it as well.  The FY2011 budget notes that the data center consolidation facilitated by cloud computing “will reduce energy consumption, space usage and environmental impacts.” This reduction fits in with the goal of Executive Order 13514—Federal Leadership in Environmental, Energy, and Economic Performance, issued in October of 2009. Under the order, agencies are compelled to “increase energy efficiency; measure, report, and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions” and to “leverage agency acquisitions to foster markets for sustainable technologies and environmentally preferable…services.”

All of which spells continuing growth and diversity of offerings in the cloud market as a whole, and, we expect, its application to physical security systems.

-Steve Van Till

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[1] U.S. Office of Management and Budget, Budget of the U.S. Government, Fiscal Year 2011 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2010), Special Topics, p 323.
[2] Imperial Capital, Security Industry Monitor (Imperial Capital, March 2010), p. 51.

[3] J. Nicholas Hoover, Federal CIO Scrutinizes Spending And Eyes Cloud Computing, 14 March 2009, 15 March 2010.