The Obama Administration is undertaking a fundamental reexamination of investments in technology infrastructure with a new emphasis on Managed Services.

The search took 0.12 seconds to come up with 41,400,000 results on Google. On Yahoo, it took 0.15 seconds to find 1,990,000,000 matches.

The search phrase: Managed Services.

With that many matches, it seems everyone has their definition of Managed Services. But most would agree: A Managed Service is one delivered by a third party to a person or organization based on a defined contracted service level agreement (SLA).

In other words, as Jack Welch, former GE head stated: “You shouldn’t have something in your back office that exists in someone else’s front office.”¹ That statement seems to describe the thinking – especially concerning IT – of the Obama Administration as it begins to put its stamp on government.

The Obama Stamp
Those who know the benefits of Managed Services see cloud computing as an evolution of the Managed Services concept.

One who knows Managed Services and Cloud Computing is Federal CIO Vivek Kundra. At FOSE 2009, he said his office is looking at “cloud computing and the model around cloud computing and asking: How can we leverage some of the innovations that have happened in the last decade?”

He is looking for cloud computing to be a “convenient, on-demand model for network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction…without the users incurring the costs of maintaining the underlying infrastructure.”²

Kundra is determined to be a leader, not a follower in terms of adopting these Managed Services innovations. “We want to make sure we get ahead. To that end, we’ve already created a body within the CIO Council that’s exploring how the federal government can move forward more aggressively in that direction.”

This determination is clearly demonstrated in President Barack Obama’s 2010 budget in a dedicated section to Optimizing Common Services and Solutions/Cloud-Computing Platform.

The budget calls for pilot projects to use existing agency architectures to identify enterprise-wide common services, delivery modes, provisioning approaches and options. The emphasis is on cloud computing platforms that deliver Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).

To back that up, on May 13, 2009 GSA and the ITI LoB sent out an RFI requesting capability statements and responses to business and pricing models, along with SLA questions from vendors who provide ‘Infrastructure as a Service’ (IaaS) offerings.³

The RFI has caused a quite a stir inside the government IT community.

First, because the Administration is backing up its words with actions and taking concrete steps to create a federal cloud capability in its 2010 federal budget recommendations.

Second, the RFIs were due to GSA May 26, 2009 – just 13 short, short days from the time the RFI was issued.

Now that the RFIs are in to GSA, CTO of the Federal Cloud, Patrick Stingley’s job will get even larger. “My job is to make sure as we plan the federal cloud, we have the technical knowledge to carry it off,” Stingley told the 1105 Government Information Group Cloud Computing conference.

All Managed Services Are Not Clouds
Cloud computing is one type of Managed Service. Stingley said that cloud computing could be used for Managed Services such as email, portals, remote hosting and other applications that would grow in complexity as experience of working securely in the cloud grows.

But he also noted that no single approach will work. No single approach or architecture can meet all of the government’s needs and security must be built in, not bolted on. Government may see the cloud off in the distance, but for now it is relying on traditional and virtual data center environments managed by Systems Integrators such as CSC, EDS, Lockheed and Unisys to meet its growing infrastructure needs.

In the telecom arena, the Networx contract is providing new opportunities for Managed Services environments to thrive with the help of companies such as AT&T, Sprint and Verizon. In the applications arena, the emphasis on buying services instead of systems is providing new opportunities for government to buy SaaS and PaaS products that provide CRM and Content Management capabilities.

But even if the Cloud were ready to occupy today, the government is not ready to move in said Stingley. “Most applications couldn’t go there because of code and OS. What we need to do is provide a suite of services in order for people to begin a migration strategy to the cloud.”

One of those in the private sector providing those integration services is Yogesh Khanna from Computer Sciences Corporation. “We believe that in the very near term clouds will in fact offer a more attractive – both technically and financially – viable model to our clients,” Khanna told 1105 Government Information Group Custom Media in a recent interview.

“But we have to do that at a pace that’s appropriate for our federal clients; it’s not an overnight switch that you flip and you take your environment into the cloud. It has to be a gradual migration for those pieces of information that make sense to live in a cloud.” Even a cloud has to have a home.

GOCO and COCO
Eventually the cloud data center will physically live in either a GOCO or COCO environment according to Khanna.

“Government owned, contractor operated (GOCO) is the government saying I want to own all of the assets, whether they be hardware or software, but I’d like a third party, a contractor, to actually manage that environment.”

The benefit for government is the flexibility to change contractor’s if they are not satisfied with the performance. “It’s not a major upheaval to swap out those who manage, because you have your own infrastructure,” explained Khanna. “You just bring somebody else in.”

Contractor owned, contractor operated (COCO) is when you truly are buying Managed Services.

“All of the assets – the hardware, software and all of the personnel required to manage that environment to deliver the IT services – are all owned by the contractor,” said Khanna. “The only thing that the client is focused on is buying the service and managing the SLAs.”

Khanna said you could make the argument that a COCO could be perceived by some as a private Cloud because all of the resources are typically dedicated to serving the needs of that particular client. It’s not really a shared services model.

“Where you leap to a cloud is if you are OK with the COCO model and  it’s OK for the contractor to leverage their infrastructure to deliver comparable services to other clients,” noted Khanna.

The Trust Factor
To make that leap government is working hard to change its biggest obstacle to using any Managed Service – its own culture, which to some is change-resistant. In the end it still comes down to trust Deputy Associate CIO of Energy Pete Tseronis told 1105 Government Information Group Custom Media in a recent interview. Tseronis is working closely with GSA on the cloud computing initiative.

“You cannot buy trust. Trust is earned,” said Tseronis. “It sure is easy to forgive, but it sure is hard to trust. You must build SLAs into these Managed Services contracts, and you have to have tightly written performance metrics.”

With the right SLAs your organization could be heading smoothly into the clouds. Just remember, the devil is in the details.

¹www.welchway.com 
² U.S. 2010 Budget: Crosscutting Programs
³ GSA/ITI LoB RFI, May 2009