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

It ’s important to understand them when agencies are creating or contemplating cloud computing plans, but they don’t necessarily want to pick them up and move them en masse to the cloud, because that way they could end up paving the cow pass. They’ll be moving over business processes and workflows that were created for older technologies and an older computing paradigm, when they might be better served by redesigning them to accommodate the cloud.

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

Cloud capabilities will become as ubiquitous as email and chat   is today, it’s just a matter of time. This is a fundamental change and very similar to what we saw with the Internet 15 years ago. We’re just at the beginning of this shift, and it’s going to be imperative that agencies accommodate this change from enterprise computing (big data centers) to cloud computing.  Agencies must convert that understanding into their existing management practices. Agencies will not be able to fully leverage the cloud or mitigate risk unless they introduce management and security practices that support this new paradigm of delivery.

The good news is that agencies have already been modifying their workflow and business processes to accommodate the Internet. Cloud based services will just be an extension of that, making the extension of current processes for cloud computing more evolutionary than revolutionary.

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

One thing that ’s absolutely clear is that cloud computing is not going to be part of a rip-and-replace implementation plan in the federal government. Instead, cloud computing is being integrated into core enterprise environments, which means that integration into existing workflow, business and security processes is an extremely important aspect for agencies and their adoption of cloud computing.

And that’s what we are seeing. The key here is that our customers are asking three basic questions that we are trying to help them answer. The first is, what makes sense to move to the cloud? The second is, if it makes sense then what’s the best way to achieve this migration to the cloud? Thirdly, if I don’t buy anything new from a hardware or software perspective, what is the best way for me to take advantage of the cloud for innovation and mission capability?

Integrating the cloud into their existing enterprise environment means answering those three questions, and making sure they have the ability to do exactly the things they want to in a more flexible, agile, affordable, and secure way. And planning for that happens right at stage one, when they start thinking about what makes sense for them to start moving to the cloud.