“The government's living in its own cloud cuckoo land...” - Bob Brown
For reasons ranging from cost savings to real time collaboration and innovation or job growth; increasingly government agencies around the globe are racing to roll out cloud services. And like most IT departments there are areas of major overlap where various groups are competing for budget and influence.
Like an awards show, below I have highlighted some of the more notable Cloud Initiatives in progress within the Public Sector, starting here in the United States:
My Favorite Cloud (Being a Space Camp graduate): Nasa Nebula
According to Wikipedia "A nebula is an interstellar cloud of dust, hydrogen gas, helium gas and plasma."
The pun-intended pilot program is under development at NASA Ames Research Center and is primarily based on open-source components and provides a virtualized dynamically scalable computing infrastructure .... hence a cloud.
Today it is used for public outreach primarily but theoretically for scientific collaboration and mission support.
As we see with Enterprises, innovation out paces infrastructure and NASA researchers see Nebula as a way to dynamically share discoveries to rapidly iterate on theories to more quickly lead to scientific discovery.
As with any organization with high value IP, data handling, privacy, and access requirements are critical so security is fundamental as well as the need to comply with agency and federal policies such as the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA).
Nebula's Infrastructure-as-a-Service leverages Eucalyptus, a cloud management system from UC Santa Barbara that is compatible with Amazon's EC2 web service.
However Nasa assures us that sensitive information is NOT being stored on Nebula
Obama's Favorite Cloud: Apps.gov
Goal - Per the launch announcement, “to lower the cost of government operations while driving innovation within the government.”
Apps.gov is an online storefront for federal agencies to quickly browse and purchase cloud-based IT services, for productivity, collaboration, and efficiency.
Breaking from their historical challenges we saw before 911 leading to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, where data (+apps) were hosted by individual agencies and on fenced off devices
As the Fed spends north of $75 billion annually on IT, the potential benefit from even minimal optimization is enormous
Additionally, for anyone who has gone through a Fed procurement process, it is painfully clear that glaciers of molasses in January move faster. Enabling a more dynamic model of sharing resources could, theoretically, enable Federal agencies to roll out new services much more quickly saving time, money (on people), and be more effective .. more upside.
Peter Mell of NIST succinctly put it, "2010 will be the year of the cloud computing pilot." I look forward to continuing this exciting conversation with you all!
Most Seafaring Cloud: Navy's CANES Initiative
Why it's cool – Like any cloud initiative, it seeks to make data and applications shared resources accessible by users/apps ... but the Navy makes it accessible by Sea.
The Consolidated Afloat Network Enterprise System (“CANES”), as you might suspect, consolidates hardware/software for centralized access which will deliver a common hosted computing environment for the entire fleet ... freeing up the ships to focus on their day job, protecting us from the bad guys ... sounds like a great idea to me!!!
The Navy is also looking at their own version of a Virtual Private Cloud for the individual boats (ok, they prefer the term vessel) called "grey clouds"
Toughest Cloud: DISA Cloud Initiative
The Defense Information Systems Agency (“DISA”) is currently putting together several Cloud services for the US Department of Defence (“DoD”).
These include Forge.mil, an open source initiative (Thanks for supporting the US software industry) which is a group of SaaS applications that support the DoD IT community.
Started in October 2008, Forge.mil is a DISA-led activity that theoretically delivers operational efficiency, cost savings, and would help protect the operational environment from potentially harmful systems and services
Another example is GIG Content Delivery Services (“GCDS”) which is actually not owned by the Public/Federal Sector , and this computing platform is shared/deployed across the DISN (NIPRnet & SIPRnet).
GCDS is designed to focus on delivering applications/data in a secure and reliable fashion no matter the state (or location) of the network or end points.
Some interesting advantages of GCDS include localized caching anywhere, global redundancy and fail-over, multi-vector scaling, defense in depth protection, edge level data and network control, rapid implementation, and neurologically based network security.
Most Empowered Cloud: US Department of Energy's Magellan
If you can't run with the big dog's stay on the porch - Funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act through the US Department of Energy (DOE), the aim is really to test if cloud computing is all it is cracked up to be or another passing trend (What, CORBA won't change the world?)
The DOE centers at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) in Illinois and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in California are installing basic but comparable systems as a test bed to assess the effectiveness of cloud computing from the perspective of energy efficiency.
What's in a name? - Viewed as an exploration of the next frontier in IT, Magellan is named (no surprise here) in honor of the Portuguese explorer whose voyage was noted as the first to circumnavigate the globe. Also the “clouds of Magellan”, 2 galaxies were named after him so it gets even more cute.
The Most Pail Cloud: Department of the Interior's NBC Cloud Initiative
The Department of the Interior's National Business Center (“NBC”) is planning a set of cloud services to be offered to the broader community of federal agencies.
Having historically operated as a service provider, NBC (no peacock included) was originally established to be a shared services provider for what those of us in the commericial sector might think of as G&A activities such as accounting, HR, etc.
Starting in 2004, NBC took on the role of being the US government wide service provider under the Information Security Systems Line of Business and in so doing quickly stumbled into the typical issues/requirements of multi-tenancy we see in the commercial space.
Today NBC (still no peacock) is planning to start with 6 cloud solutions: NBCGrid (IaaS), NBCFiles (Cloud Storage), NBCStage (PaaS), NBC Hybrid Cloud, NBCApps (SaaS Marketplace), & NBCAuth.
Around the World
“Behind every cloud is another cloud.” - Judy Garland
James Bond's Favorite Cloud: The UK's G-Cloud Initiative (it even sounds classy)
Announced by Great Britain's Federal CIO, this onshore and private initiative by the government is aimed at delivering a middleware platform for delivering data and applications as shared services in a iTunes.gov.uk like application store.
Initiated with a study/investigation into the effectiveness of Cloud Computing and Virtualization, the apparent success of their test results turned into a full blow IT initiative
As in the US, the goal is to empower UK government agencies to benefit from the costs savings and efficiencies of a shared computing environment while also maintaining the appropriate levels of security, accountability and control required government programs.
Having previously kept such efforts within specialized teams/groups, this is the first effort to bring IT innovation directly under the responsibility of their operating agencies (or for those of use from the private sector think business owners not IT).
The Cloud with the most painful acronym: The EU's RESERVOIR project
While Government agencies are known for their use of acronym's the EU (already an acronym) takes the cake with the Resources and Services Virtualization without Barriers Project (“RESERVOIR”).
As in the US and the UK, the project is designed to provide cost savings, efficiency, and scalability across a shared pool of IT resources and geographies.
With On-Demand resource provisioning and Web 2.0 use of applications as a services and networks as platforms to expedite time to market for new government resources to help the EU compete on the global stage
The EU hopes to leverage RESERVOIR to enhance the competitiveness of their economy and bring about a powerful ICT infrastructure for the reliable and effective delivery of services as utilities.
Most Friendly Cloud: Canada's Cloud Initiative
The inititaive was essentially otlined in a paper from the Canadian Government's CTO of Public Works as a strategy for helping diminish the negative impact of IT on the Environment
It also suggests that leverage the inherent cooling advantages of the geography of Canada make the country an ideal location for hosting world wide cloud initiatives
Looking at this from the perspective of a traveler, Canadians are possibly the most generally likable travelers and hosting high value infrastructure there might make it safer from unintended terrorist attacks.
The Sunniest Cloud: Japan's Kasumigaseki Cloud Initiative
Dubbed the ICT Hatoyama Plan as outlined by the Digital Japan Creation Project, Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has released plans to deliver a massive cloud computing infrastructure to support all of the government’s IT systems.
Tentatively named Kasumigaseki after Japan's first high rise building (1st building in the clouds) the plan is to deliver the infrastructure in stages with full role out by 2015.
As seen in other countries the goal is IT efficiency for cost savings and speed of rolling out new solutions and services
Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) anticipates that the project will boost the economy
