Andrea Di MaioYesterday I attended a session about cloud computing organized by the central IT organization of a US state. Like many internal government IT service providers, they are developing a cloud computing strategy to improve their service offering to client agencies and to reduce their costs. I was positively impressed as they have been focusing on very concrete system infrastructure (aka IaaS) services, piloting them before promoting them to their clients. Given the impending elections and the challenging financial situation, they do not feel that articulating a longer term strategy, e.g. looking also at software (aka SaaS) and application platform (aka PaaS) services, is a priority, although they have rather clear ideas about to address the latter too.
We discussed about how, in spite of the constraints above, they should position their current efforts as the initial steps of a roadmap leading to a more comprehensive and somewhat compelling cloud computing vision. As suggested by efforts undertaken by the US federal or the UK government, a keystone of a government cloud computing vision is the so-called “storefront”, which is meant to be the primary channel to purchase, configure and use cloud-based services.
While this IT organization is clearly focusing on a provider view (“how can we provide services that are equally or more competitive than what vendors’ ones?”), they should also take a user view and look at how to extend or even transform their role from being service providers to being service brokers, procurement partners and advisors for their clients, in order to help them identify the right solutions to meet their needs, be those cloud or not, be those internal or external.
While I was impressed with both the down-to-Earth approach and the willingness to challenge themselves, I observed (and told them) that they were exhibiting a vendor behavior at times. This is a pattern I have noticed with several, rather mature and well-run government IT organizations as they approach the opportunities and risks of cloud computing.
My suggestion to them is always to ask them the following question:
- Which of our clients do really need cloud services and why?
- For various categories of services, should we be the providers, should be manage the procurement vehicle (e.g. the storefront) or should we let our clients make their own vendor choices?
As usual, putting cloud computing in the context of other, more traditional delivery models helps formulate the answers to those questions. At the end of the day, for how sexy and transformative cloud computing may look like, it all boils down to good old sourcing.
Category: cloud Tags: government cloud
4 responses so far ↓
1 uberVU - social comments April 22, 2010 at 9:02 am
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2 Steve Crawford April 23, 2010 at 4:07 pm
Whether an IT group views themselves as a cloud ‘broker’ or a ‘provider’ may well depend on what function they serve within the organization.
IT infrastructure groups will tend to focus on providing IaaS offerings, predominantly viewed as a private cloud offering with public cloud equivalents for non mission critical or cloud bursting functions. ‘Cloudifying’ their data centers will be viewed as a means to deliver their virtualized services strategy.
On the flip-side, IT application groups who source and manage SaaS offerings for their LOB customers will have more of a public cloud view, and thus their role will focus more on understanding LOB application needs and then procuring/managing external SaaS providers (e.g. salesforce.com).
IT operations groups may be best positioned to play the cloud services brokerage role out of necessity, driven by the need to provide a unified services framework for private and public cloud fulfillment via self-service catalogues, security and policy enforcement, user authorization and access control, service provisioning and administration, compliance management, departmental charge-backs based on private/public cloud usage, aggregated help-desk support, etc. throughout their organizations.
Steve Crawford
http://www.jamcracker.com
3 Andrea Di Maio April 26, 2010 at 9:02 am
@Steve – Great point about different behaviors of application and infrastructure groups. In fact the former seem to be taking more a user view, whilte the latter often behave like vendors.
You are right that IT operations group would be in a good position, but I would argue that taking a more rational and coherent approach takes a strong enterprise architecture discipline, which is unfortunately lacking in quite a few government organizations.
4 Steve Crawford April 28, 2010 at 11:04 am
Hi Andrea,
I agree that the scenario you cited needs to be influenced by an architectural viewpoint that can represent different user needs and map them back to IT delivery. A “build it and they will come” approach to private-cloud IaaS will fail if the IT organization can’t provide the same ease-of-discovery, fulfillment and access that an internal user can already experience today when procuring public cloud-based IaaS (e.g. EC2, etc.).
I suspect the way this may play out is that internal customers (users) who have a time-critical need for cloud-based computing may initially try to utilize the internal IaaS, but that over time there will be leakage to public IaaS providers, purchased with under-the-radar discretionary budget, especially for ad hoc project needs.
At some point IT security will get wind of this and concerns over lack of an audit trail regarding where their data is going will become the driver for implementing a more holistic architectural approach for how the organization can centralize command and control over internal and external clouds delivery and management.
The benefit to the storefront notion you mentioned is that it makes discovery and self-fulfillment easier for internal users, and if that same storefront also serves as the access portal to both private and public clouds, then it helps address security and compliance enforcement/auditing issues. In addition, by centralizing fulfillment and access control to all internal/external clouds, it also enables IT to do a better job of cost allocation and charge-backs to their internal departmental users.
What we’ve seen at Jamcracker (we provide a cloud-brokering platform for service providers and IT organizations) is that IT has to look at the entire life-cycle of delivery and management and map it to their internal user needs. The complexity is that users will have a need to access both private and public clouds and therefore the ultimate solution is one that can federate the discovery, fulfillment, access control, auditing, support, and departmental charge-backs across the entire organization.
Steve