The White House recently released its Federal Cloud Computing Strategy on February 8, 2011. The new strategy is in conjunction with the OMB’s Cloud First Policy which is intended to accelerate the pace at which federal agencies implement a cloud strategy. According to the document, this strategy is designed to: • Articulate the benefits, considerations, and trade-offs of cloud computing • Provide a decision framework and case examples to support agencies in migrating towards cloud computing • Highlight cloud computing implementation resources • Identify Federal Government activities and roles and responsibilities for catalyzing cloud adoption By now, I’m sure just about everyone is familiar with the many benefits cloud computing offers. So I can safely bet that instead of asking “why,” your question now is “how.” And with this new push released by the White House, there isn’t a better time to get the answer and begin the implementation process.

So over a year into the Cloud Computing marketing machine, does anyone really understand what it is? You hear about vendors such as Terremark, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. offering some form of cloud computing. But what do they really offer? Can any agency just move their email or applications “into the cloud?” Let’s start with a definition… What types of Cloud Computing are there? Cloud computing breaks down into one of 3 areas: • Infrastructure as a Service: This is the traditional Managed Server Providers like Rackspace that provides their server to a customer on a monthly or yearly basis. Infrastructure such as power, data networking, and cooling are offloaded to them, and applications and operating system are the customer’s responsibility. • Platform as a Service: This is a model that vendors such as Google Apps and Amazon operate in. The vendor provides a “platform,” whether that’s email services, web, or storage hosting. This pulls the management of the underlying application and operating system to the vendor from the customer. This allows the customer to quickly add capacity if needed on demand. • Software as a Service: These are the ASPs (application service providers) such as SalesForce.com, Oracle CRM on Demand, and Remedy on Demand. The ASP hosts all aspects of the application and platform, and provides access in a multi-tenant environment that is shared across all their customers.

Managers in the Public Sector are wrestling with the wide range of options provided by the evolving Cloud services paradigm. Most are now familiar with the three Cloud service models (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) and more than a few are testing the waters. The proliferation of Cloud services from a wide range of name brand vendors and the success stories from commercial companies provides a certain level of confidence that government agencies can realize similar economies in shifting to the Cloud for at least some IT services. Indeed, OMB, in its ‘Cloud First’ policy, has mandated serious consideration of the Cloud by agencies as the federal Data Center Consolidation initiative is implemented.

As this is the first week of the first year of a new decade, predictions are in demand. Below are my predictions for Information Technology in the Federal, State, and Local public sector. I promise to revisit these predictions at the end of December to test their accuracy. Wink. Cloud Computing: Off and running, finally. In the last few months the Departments of Interior and Agriculture, and the General Services Administration have committed to the cloud for office productivity applications like Google Apps or Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite. Major cities including Los Angeles and New York have also made the decision to adopt cloud services. The latest buzz is that FedRAMP will be ready for prime time by April.

Evaluating agency needs in the face of new directives like the Federal Cloud Computing Initiative can be daunting. Analyzing emerging technology in terms of an enterprise architecture is complicated at best, but divorcing the service mission from the technology can highlight less disruptive paths for integrating new paradigms. Understanding and leveraging the benefits of a loosely coupled design will make technology shifts attainable. Cloud computing is the next step in computing evolution. The concepts and techniques in play are the culmination of years converging technologies. We are seeing the perfect storm of technology and practice bringing out a new and exciting methodology. Cloud architecture promises all of the features that system architects and administrators have struggled to deliver for years: elastic, scalable, fault tolerant computing resources.

I believe cloud computing will become the default IT delivery model for public sector organizations within the next five years. Some may think that this conclusion is “stating the obvious” while others may doubt the ability of public sector organizations to embrace a new way of delivering IT services during the worst recession in decades. In fact, budget constraints will not stop the trend towards cloud computing – rather, the current financial difficulties in the public sector will accelerate the inevitable adoption of cloud computing. Technology innovations and financial drivers have aligned to push IT organizations rapidly towards a cloud computing model. I see cloud computing as the next logical step in the steady evolution of the distributed IT service model. Cloud computing is neither radical nor new – we can see that the precursors of cloud computing were put in place over the last decade.

I hope that you enjoyed our series on ERP Trends in technology for 2010 and beyond. We’ve, hopefully, given you something to think about and to consider as you plan your IT strategy going forward. One of the more interesting things that we’ve deduced from observing these trends is the increase in services & support. At first glance you would think that this would be counter-intuitive given the advances in software. That is, with the newest versions of software being mostly self-managed—e.g. OEM, Cloud Computing – you would think that the need for specialized labor would decrease but in fact it has increased. Why is that?

In the ongoing saga of Federal adoption of clouds one of the sticky wickets has been the requirement by law that all Federal information systems comply with the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002, commonly referred to as FISMA. In a very small nutshell FISMA requires that information systems comply with security guidelines that are the responsibility of the National Institute of Standards (NIST) and that these systems are monitored for vulnerabilities.

The only thing hotter and steamier than the weather in D.C. right now is the conversation about cloud. And, it's both tiring and confusing. There are more flavors of cloud than of coffee at Starbucks - private, community, public - not to mention IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. Venti, double-caramel macchiato, skim-milk latte @ 190°...

Continuation from Top Trends in ERP for 2010 Part III 9.            SaaS is probably the most significant non-ERP trend to look forward to. There isn’t much growth for ERP in regards to cloud computing but there is anticipated growth in application hosting.