The Economics of Federal Cloud Computing Analyzed 85
jg21 writes "With the federal government about to spend $20B on IT infrastructure, this highly analytical article by two Booz Allen Hamilton associates makes it clear that cloud computing has now received full executive backing and offers clear opportunities for agencies to significantly reduce their growing expenditures for data centers and IT hardware. From the article: 'A few agencies are already moving quickly to explore cloud computing solutions and are even redirecting existing funds to begin implementations... Agencies should identify the aspects of their current IT workload that can be transitioned to the cloud in the near term to yield "early wins" to help build momentum and support for the migration to cloud computing.'"
Re:Perfect fit! (Score:3, Interesting)
If it's the NSA losing the data than it's a feature for the public; illegal domestic spying considered.
Re:Just typical (Score:3, Interesting)
Is this funny? Or do people just chime in with whatever enters their head but is actually not funny? Serious question.
Well you can't just say "first post" anymore, you'd get modded down instantly. So you have to think of something in the .7 seconds before you lost the first post spot. So yeah, probably is the first thing that came to mind.
The other possibility is that it's a setup for a top level reply. Perhaps something along the lines of a These government types always have their heads up their clouds with a FTFY-type note. With that kind of visibility a +5 funny is easy to get.
Now you reply and collect the "holy over-analysis batman" karma :-)
Not Suprising (Score:3, Interesting)
Booz Allen Hamilton is the consulting wing of the military-industrial-complex. Look at their members: Bushes, CIA/NSA directors, etc. This is the wing of the Republican party whose only problem with the size and scope of government is that it still has some semblance of democratic accountability, rather than having been farmed out to some shadow corporate control. The agenda is to centralize, nationalize, and privatize key US assets wherever possible. Information technology is becoming a crucial means of political control in the digital age. And clouds represent the perfect way to outsource and obfuscate that control, outside the reach of pesky freedom of information laws, of course losing any disparaging information in the process.
As an anecdote: Google opened a new datacenter near here recently. It has twice as many armed guards as IT staff. I would hate to be the one to have to serve a warrant on that place. Do you think that might be a convenient place to store your medical records, government or corporate e-mails, mortgage records for well-connected politicians, illegal spying programs, etc? What happens when the information you're looking for can't be tied to any one physical machine, or geographic location even?
The joke of Gubbmint technology (Score:4, Interesting)
Remember Carnivore? The FBI email filter that sniffed network traffic and kept copies of emails sent to a directed user? It fell afoul of privacy groups and was eventually withdrawn as it was effectively a form of warrantless wiretapping.
I wish I could find the source - but I remember it as C/Net or something like that. Anyway, the problem behind it's withdrawal wasn't that it was ineffective, (it was) nor was it that it picked up emails to people other than the intended recipient. (It didn't) The problem was that the carnivore system itself was insecure.
So the FBI would deploy this thing, essentially packet-sniffing an ISP's network, and then would be hacked by the Chinese or the Ruskies and all the information gathered by the FBI intelligence was then disclosed to the foreign powers. It was (apparently) an open Joke within the spy community.
Why does this somehow come to mind when I think of "Cloud computing" for the gubbmint? Because as bad as it is for the gubbmint getting a system to be secured, doing so with an outside 3rd party takes the problem to a whole new magnitude.
fat app servers and thin clients (Score:2, Interesting)
There needs to be real answers to real questions. How is cloud computing different from the fat servers and thin clients talked about in the old days? Will google allow self-provisioning of their apps to private clouds? Other company's and their web apps? Most cloud enthusiasts insist data is safe and secure on the internet, but there are many military / government orgs that must use detached, self provisioned, private clouds. Probably most major corporations will demand self-provisioned applications and data too. What no one appears to want any more is the data loss associated with fat client PCs and local hard drive applications/data. I don't think metered CPU/mem/apps/data on some supposed "secure internet" is going to work for everyone. I think people need to start thinking more about fat app/data services and thin clients on isolated intranets, perhaps using crypto VPNs to connect them, and less about global metered-use clouds on the internet.
Security (Score:3, Interesting)
Ummm... yeah.
So gov't worker A in an agency which name the worker cannot disclose has confidential files. He also has access to a cloud application for publishing, sharing purposes.
So, how do we safe guard uploading the sensitive document, accidentally of course, to a cloud application which is not locked down or has poor security?
This has already happened with regular application, but if the information is distributed across many servers possibly many organizations how do you plug the leak?
Previously there was only a single point of failure, now there is an unknown number of locations for the information leak.
You may as well post the document link on slashdot.
Cloud computing offers nothing. (Score:5, Interesting)
Cloud computing offers nothing. And by nothing I mean nothing new. Nor does it fix anything. The internet already works.
There, I said it.
For 99% of us, a web server does everything we need it to. Redundancy and fault tolerance are already very easy to buy in other forms that are perfectly reliable and non-invasive (RAID, adding servers for specific services, buying better hardware etc). These problems were solved long ago.
Yes, for the rare corporation that requires huge server clusters, cloudifying their infrastructure is the right direction to go. But that and buying a cloud are two completely different stories. If your server count is already that high, then you most likely already have the budget and the people to create your own cloud optimized for your specific needs, that works only for you.
Just like businesses love dedicated servers even when a shared server would do fine, businesses also love dedicated clouds.
Cloud providers need to think again about what and to whom they are selling. I see a market for super cheap hosting for the masses by selling competitive hosting packages by leveraging the cost efficiency and performance benefits of a cloud. I also see a market for dedicated custom cloud solutions for the high end market. However, both of these markets are extremely saturated, and if you are not selling anything new, you are primarily competing by price alone. Any such market is a lot of hard work for not so much money.
So good luck! PS. I am not buying.
Re:Cloud computing offers nothing. (Score:3, Interesting)
I didn't find this to be true for me. When I moved my humble little web application from a dedicated host to a cloud platform (Amazon), I saved myself 50%. A dedicated server or hard drive is rented in bulk, so you wind up paying for a lot of unused capacity while you wait for your needs to catch up to your investment. Amazon does charge a preimium price, but there's zero fat. YMMV, but the upshot for me was that Amazon was in fact cheaper. The fact that I also get all the virtualization-on-demand toys made this a slam dunk.
Re:Economies of Scale (Score:4, Interesting)
Server Utilization (Score:5, Interesting)
Having read through this article server utilization is the most important factor driving better economics for the cloud :
"Our analysis assumes an average utilization rate of 12 percent of available CPU capacity in the SQ environment and 60 percent in the virtualized cloud scenarios."
(SQ means status quo, i.e., non-cloud.) This factor of 5 improvement in average utilization drives the overall cost savings and they are assuming a cloud overhead of about 45%. (I.e., if you look that their numbers, they assume that cloud CPU cycles cost 45% more than local cycles, but the efficiency is 5 times higher, for a overall cost reduction of a factor of 3.4 in the "public" cloud case, which has the largest savings.)
A factor of 5 in server utilization is huge; the question is, is it realistic ? Note that 60% usage corresponds to 100% usage for 14 hours per day, 7 days a week, or 20 hours of full usage for 5 days per week, and so would be quite high for a government web site. If government web servers dominate the cloud computing, the savings are likely not to be as large as this study supposes, because no amount of aggregation of government web site servers will get you much traffic in the middle of the night.
If you think about it, to be economically effective cloud computing (in the big picture) has to be about saving money by increasing average server utilization (averaged over all users). Cloud servers are not free, and require resources to service and maintain, and clouds have overhead. If some service is barely loading a single server, sure, I can see it being cheaper in the cloud. If servers are maxxed out almost all of the time, I bet that the cloud won't save much money. If the aggregate use is highly time variable, the cloud will not save as much money as a simple calculation would indicate, as the cloud will have servers sitting idle during off hours. For this particular article, its hard to say more as they don't reveal their actual data.
Re:Cloud computing offers nothing. (Score:3, Interesting)
Super! Where do I sign up with the 3rd parties that have been providing cloud services to Amazon and Google for over a decade?
Perhaps we need to define our terms first.