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

The Department of Energy has had a project to move some of its applications to the cloud, as has the Department of Health and Human Services around electronic health records. But there will be a lot more. At our symposium, 58 percent of the surveyed agencies attending said they were already making use of the cloud to some extent, though the vast majority were talking about private in-house or outsourced clouds.

That’s likely to continue. Over two-thirds of the respondents to our survey said they were looking to implement private in-house clouds versus using public clouds, even when they look at what their longer range plans are.

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

I believe the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is one of the most forward leaning agency when it comes to cloud initiatives.

Working with Akamai, DISA has developed a number of cloud computing solutions available to US military, DoD government civilians and DoD contractors.

The agency’s cloud solutions include: Forge.mil, a system that enables the collaborative development and use of open source and DoD community source software; GIG Content Delivery Service (GCDS), a private cloud deployment of services to over 60 government DOD agencies; and Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE), a quick-turn solution that uses cloud computing to deliver fast, inexpensive and secure platforms. This service is implemented world wide using Akamai technology behind DISA’s firewall.

The General Services Administration (GSA) deploys a secure public cloud offering called USA.gov, which is designed to communicate more effectively with citizens on real-time issues and to foster transparent communications on topics such as benefits, taxes, jobs and healthcare initiatives.

Finally, I’d point to the Census Bureau, which is a classic case for the cloud and how appropriate it is for certain environments. The agency must take on a critical once-in-a-decade mission where it needs to deliver both front end and back end systems to meet the demands of the 2010 Census. The key challenges include the need to deliver on-demand scalability, enhanced Web experience for maximum citizen participation, and 100 percent availability, especially because the bureau has a critical timeframe to conduct the Census and report results to the government and to the public.

The bureau implemented an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud to meet on-demand business challenges. In doing so, the agency was able to offload 85 percent of its infrastructure needs, without putting an additional penny into its infrastructure for the support and execution of the short-term mission.

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

There are some private clouds in the government that started out from a shared services environment and, in many cases, they ’re using components of cloud computing technologies as opposed to a complete cloud. But you’ve got Data.gov at the General Services Administration, the National Business Center at the Department of Interior, NASA’s Nebula, and DISA with the Rapid Access Computing Environment. I think those are among the best examples of agencies that are further along.

And that’s primarily because these agencies were already further along than other agencies with respect to their shared services model, and they were already provisioning a series of core missions with that model. To go from a shared services model to a cloud computing model was a natural step for them.

A good example of one that’s fairly mature along those lines would be DISA, which had a service oriented architecture infrastructure from which they built services, so it’s natural to take that infrastructure and transition that into a cloud on which they could then host applications, and also provide a platform for others to build applications that they could use across the Department of Defense.