GiGi Schumm,
Vice President and General Manager, Public Sector, Symantec Corp.

It would be around the whole concept of trust and compliance. How can they ensure their data is secure when they move them to the cloud, and not only secure but able to meet all of the data compliance and governance requirements? They could take many applications and just throw them into the cloud, but they shouldn’t unless they understand that the applications and the data will be as secure as if they were housed within the agency’s own four walls. They need to know how that data will be managed, how they segment them from someone else’s information, and so on.

There also has to be a degree of transparency between the agency and the cloud provider. For example, Symantec uses cloud-based services to help run our business and we have applications and important data that are out in the cloud. You can be sure we have many conversations with our cloud provider, that we have service level agreements and audit rights, and that the provider is meeting the same security standards that we would use. We need to make sure that the provider can and is doing what they say are doing.

Tom Ruff,
Vice President, Public Sector, Akamai Technologies, Inc.

Agencies really need to fully understand their environment and therefore the applications which are most appropriate for the cloud. And I would add one more suggestion. They ’ve got to have secure computing in order for cloud computing to take off. To do that they must hold their service providers accountable. Don’t compromise the mission just to save money. At the end of the day, if they understand the cloud and what their service providers can deliver, they can accomplish their mission and save money.

Richard W. Johnson,
Chief Technology Officer and Vice President, Lockheed Martin Information Systems & Global Solutions

Don ’t forget there are transformation considerations, and you need to plan for your transition from your current environment to a cloud environment. Understand that a risk management approach is the best way to handle that, because there are many permutations and combinations in delivering and accessing cloud services. And you really need to be able to look at the different options and decide what’s best for your agency.

Remember that best practices that apply to every project also apply to cloud computing. Cloud computing happens to be an inflection point in our industry, and as a leader, this inflection point provides an opportunity to apply your past experience and leverage this new capability to quickly provide value for your agency or mission.