terremark whitepaper - using cloud computing for open government

8/9/2019 Terremark Whitepaper - Using Cloud Computing for Open Government

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Cloud Computing: A Vital Step to

Federal IT Transformation

White paper

INTRODUCTION

The federal governments approach to information technology is undergoing a seismic shift. Information access and

security concerns, dominated by physical access and control, have long governed agency thinking when it comes to

building the infrastructure that houses their data assets. Increasingly, though, high costs with few or no economiesof scale, and an inability to share or aggregate information across departmental and agency boundaries in a timely

way are causing real problems. The governments responsiveness to its citizenry and its eectiveness in dealing with

twenty-rst century threats techno-terrorism and cybersecurity attacks as cases in point are being aected.

With his Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government 1, issued on January 21, 2009, the President instructed

the Director of the Oce of Management and Budget (OMB) to issue an Open Government Directive that mandates

agencies to develop public-facing websites and post up-to-date information to support federal transparency,

participation, and collaboration goals:

Transparency: Promote accountability by providing the public with information about what the government is

doing through public-facing websites.

Participation:Allow the public to contribute ideas and expertise so that the government can make policies with

the benet of information that is widely dispersed in society.

Collaboration:Improve eectiveness by encouraging partnerships and cooperation within the federal government,

across levels of government, and between the government and private institutions.

The Memorandum also set aggressive timelines for meeting these goals. Agencies were directed to take prompt steps

by making information available online in open formats that can be easily retrieved, downloaded, indexed, and searched

by commonly used web search applications. However, creating public-facing websites and converting stored data to

user-friendly formats poses signicant IT infrastructure and security challenges.


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CLOUD COMPUTING: MEETING NEW INFRASTRUCTURE DEMANDS

Agencies have traditionally deployed and managed their own IT infrastructure. Much intra-agency information was

held captive by the constraints of security and compliance concerns. The Open Government Memorandum represents

a departure from traditional IT practices, and meeting its requirements will have a signicant impact on agencies

infrastructures. Additional guidance was recently provided when the federal governments 2010 IT initiatives were

outlined at a high level. The budget overview discussed the governments plan to transform its IT infrastructure

by virtualizing data centers, consolidating data centers and operations, and ultimately adopting a cloud-computingbusiness model.2

Cloud computing represents a fundamental change in managing and delivering information because the information

owners and users no longer need to work directly with the supporting physical infrastructure to benet from the

services and information it delivers. As the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) denes it, Cloud

computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of congurable computing

resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released

with minimal management eort or service provider interaction.3 As such, this oers a number of marked advantages

to agencies seeking to meet the governments new open government requirements or otherwise make more eective,

collaborative use of their data.

INCREASING SCALABILITY WHILE REDUCING INFRASTRUCTURE COST

Making agency data publicly accessible or available to other departments for collaborative action means that Federal

CIOs will face a common challenge: how to support unpredictable usage peaks and patterns as interaction that is not

easily modeled ebbs and ows. Many government sites receive millions of hits per day and trac volumes can vary

signicantly. Trac increases dramatically and performance degrades when highly anticipated statistics are released,

during times of natural disasters or other crises, or at peak reporting times. As a growing volume of data is made

public or otherwise shared, traditional infrastructure cannot scale to support surge requirements or the real-time

responsiveness required. Building extra capacity into the infrastructure to accommodate usage peaks results in idle

capacity and is not a cost-eective strategy.

Cloud computing revolutionizes infrastructure cost and scalability decisions. First, IT decision-makers can leverage

a massively scalable, shared virtualized infrastructure to avoid capital expenditures and reduce operating expenses.

Agencies dont have to win approval for large capital expenditures, and can avoid the costs of hardware, software,

salaries for specialized IT resources, training and ongoing support. Cloud computing also enables granular scalability,

scaling up and down as needed to deliver guaranteed resources on demand. If trac volume spikes, additional

capacity can be immediately enabled, either directly via a provisioning interface or programmatically via the use of

application programming interfaces (APIs), and those resources can be retired just as easily after the event. With

dynamic access to capacity on demand, agencies are not faced with building an infrastructure sized to usage peaks.

Agencies need only pay for what they use, improving asset utilization and simplifying nancial decision-making.

ENABLING AGILITY

Infrastructure agility will be an important component to encouraging agency and citizen participation and

collaboration. New data sets must be made rapidly available for the information to be relevant and useful to users.

Traditional government procurement and deployment cycles can take months, reducing the usability of data before it

can even be published. Because cloud infrastructure delivers guaranteed resources on demand, new capacity can be

added and high volumes of data posted or shared in real time.


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Services Administration (GSA) received the monitoring and reporting features it needed and it also added a number

of security elements provided and integrated by their service provider atop the cloud environment. For example, GSA

required multi-factor authentication to access the USA.gov administrative portal, along with resource tracking, 128-bit

encryption for trac, and packet ow analysis. Now USA.gov can maintain a small persistent footprint and deploy

on-demand scaling as trac uctuates. When trac is at normal levels, GSA pays only a contracted baseline fee, but

it can seamlessly accommodate volume spikes when needed. Migration to the cloud has enabled GSA to avoid paying

for idle server time without compromising its ability to deliver real-time performance for users. As Federal CIO VivekKundra has repeatedly said publicly, the GSA reduced annual costs for this service from $2.5 million to $800,000 by

moving it to cloud technology. In addition, this agile computing infrastructure allows GSA to deploy upgrades to USA.

gov in 24 hours instead of the six months that would otherwise be required in a traditional infrastructure model.

Enterprise-class cloud providers are building security into their cloud oerings, and services can be audited and

certied to meet government and agency-specic requirements. Agencies considering a cloud computing solution can

benet from adopting a service with the same characteristics as the USA.gov and Data.gov cloud computing solutions.

NEXT STEP: IT TRANSFORMATION

The governments 2010 IT initiatives outline further guidance on using virtualization and cloud computing to transform

agencies IT infrastructures and initiatives. However, the benets already realized by two large federal agencies arehelping lead the way for other agencies tasked with bringing data to citizens through public-facing web sites. For more

information about cloud computing services designed for government requirements, visit www.terremarkfederal.com,

or contact Terremark Federal at (703) 964-8900.

Endnotes:

1. Executive Oce of the President of the United States. Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies . Transparency and Open Government. By President Barack Obama. 1/21/10.

2. Oce of Management and Budget. Crosscutting Programs. Budget of the United States Government, FY 2011. 2010.

3. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The NIST Denition of Cloud Computing. Version 15. By Peter Mell and Tim Grance. 10/7/09.

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CLOUD COMpUtiNG

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