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Coming Soon to a Cloud Near You…
Posted November 22nd, 2010 by rybolov
Considering that it’s a secondary source and therefore subject to being corrected later in an official announcement, but this is pretty big. Requiring the Departments and Agencies to consider cloud solutions both scares me (security, governance, and a multitude of other things about rushing into mandated solutions) and excites me (now cloud solutions are formally accepted as viable).
However, before you run around either proclaiming that “this is the death of serverhuggers” or “the end is nigh, all is lost” or even “I for one welcome our fluffy white overlords”, please consider the following:
- A “secure, reliable, cost-effective cloud option” is a very loaded statement very open to interpretation
- They already have to consider open source solutions
- They already have to consider in-sourcing
- They already have to consider outsourcing
- “Cloud” more often than not includes private clouds or community clouds
- Isn’t this just another way to say “quit reinventing the wheel”?
- Some Government cloud initiatives are actually IT modernization initiatives riding the bandwagon-du-jour
- Switching from Boeing, Northrup, and SAIC beltway bandit overlords to Google, Amazon, and SalesForce cloud overlords still mean that you have overlords
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2 Comments »
Tags: cashcows • cloud • cloudcomputing • fedramp • google • government • itsatrap • management • moneymoneymoney • scalability
November 22nd, 2010 at 11:23 am
I’m by no means an expert or have some super knowledge, but one thing that would worry me is access to data stored in however “cloud” is defined here. Maybe the article is simply talking about “private cloud” or just internally-hosted web services? Anyway…
I’m pretty sure Amazon, Salesforce, and Google have staff in other parts of the world that are not US citizens. If Google has a China office and employs Chinese citizens, what assurance is there that the Google China office is isolated properly from having any chance to influence or read such data? I’d expect very little. (Google and China may be a bad example considering recent history, but hopefully it illustrates the point.)
Using open source tools in-house to handle things is one thing, but to actually have data in the hands of others is entirely different. Maybe that is the future (for gov’t, and the present for the rest of us), but rushing into this is asking for trouble.
I find it troubling that “fixing IT” is a goal, but simply outsourcing it further away doesn’t transfer the problem or make things magically easier/better. Maybe “cloud” should have been defined in the article first…
November 22nd, 2010 at 6:08 pm
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