Feds To Adopt 'Cloud First' IT Policy

theodp writes "The White House Thursday announced plans to restructure IT by consolidating federal government data centers and applications, and adopting a so-called 'cloud first' policy. Unveiled by federal CIO Vivek Kundra, the 25-Point Plan (PDF) calls for cutting 800+ data centers by 2015, as well as shifting work to cloud computing systems. The new 'Cloud First' policy cites the ability of Animoto.com to scale vs. the government's short-lived Cars.gov (Cash for Clunkers), although Google Trends suggests this may be somewhat of an apple-to-oranges comparison for justifying a national IT strategy. As long as we're talking clouds, a tag cloud of the 25-Point Plan underscores that the Feds are counting more on IT Program and Contract Management rather than Computer Science wizardry to deliver 'the productivity improvements that private industry has realized from IT.' Not to be a buzzkill, but those of you celebrating CS Education Week might be advised to consider an MBA if you want a Federal IT career."

Sounds like a plan

[0123456]

I heard some place called 'Wikileaks' was offering the government a good deal for cheap cloud hosting.

As a fan of WikiLeaks...

[MasterOfMagic]

I welcome this move. Sure hope you have enough of an infrastructure to keep, say, taxpayer SSNs, DOBs, mother's maiden names out of the cloud, not to mention the inevitable access to this cloud resource by the SIPRnet.

It's a good time for government transparency, whether intentional or not.

Clouds don't leak right?

[Peverbian]

Clouds don't leak right? I mean, there's no way any sensitive information could make its way out of there on some Root Access Inter-Node something.

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[account_deleted]

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We had that setup in the 1960s and the 1970s.

[Anonymous Coward]

We had just that setup in the 1960s and the 1970s at the universities I worked at. We called them "mainframes".

Then we spent most of the 1980s and 1990s trying to get rid of them, because highly centralized systems are often extremely expensive to build and maintain, and usually don't actually provide what each of the many users actually requires.

In terms of reliability, it's better for a single department or lab to be unable to get their work done due to software or hardware failure of some sort, rather than the entire campus being shit out of luck when the mainframe, err, "cloud", has issues.

You fools will spend the next decade getting this "cloud" bullshit put in place. Then around 2020 or so, you'll have had 10 years worth of problems. You'll then spend until 2030 trying to undo the mess. Sometime around 2040 you'll succeed, but by that time the current IT staff will have forgotten the problems that "cloud computing" caused between 2010 and 2020, and then by 2050 they'll be in the process of centralizing again...

Re:So sad

[jav1231]

First of all, there is no cloud. A "cloud computing system" is a server and/or group of servers. All they're doing is closing down data centers and moving the data to either someone else's or other government centers. Second, if it "is" managed services who's managing it? If I have a data center in Houston run by say the IRS and I'm an employee in Bridgport and my files are on servers in Houston then I'm "cloud" computing. This is an over-hyped bunch of crap. While everyone is drooling over the new marketing term think about the big elephant in the room. Yeah, we call him Tim. Know what he's doing? Firing all those people in those data centers that are closing down. The nice thing about "moving to the cloud" or more correctly "outsourcing" is that eventually, they come back. Why? Because putting your stuff in someone else's hands just to free yours eventually makes you wonder about what you had in your hands. It's like sending your friend shopping with your girlfriend. You start to wonder what they're doing when they've been gone too long.

Re:Vivek Kundra is a fraud

[jsepeta]

And anyone who's done the least bit of research on outsourcing knows that it may actually _increase_ costs in the long-term, because the security of the data and the proper management of the data is worth far more than the savings found by giving your nuts to some other squirrel to fuck around with.