On December 9, 2010, Vivek Kundra, the US Chief Information Officer (Did you even know we had one?) released a twenty-five point plan to overhaul the federal government's IT strategy.
One of the most striking points is a very aggressive move to the cloud. The plan calls for identifying three government services to be moved to the cloud. One of those is to be fully cloud-based within a year with the other two joining the first in eighteen months. The scale and ambition of that project boggles the mind.
I'm pretty jazzed about this. In the long run, this ought to save us (U.S.) money. The GSA moved just its e-mail services to the cloud and realized a 50% savings ($15 Million over five years - just for e-mail). It will also allow for new resources to be added quickly, or reduce redundant resources when demand drops. They'll also short-cut the tedious procurement and certification procedures involved with provisioning physical data centers.
There are still a lot of questions to be answered, naturally. Foremost in most people's minds will be security. Ensuring sensitive data is properly safeguarded and getting that assurance out to the average citizen will be paramount. I also wonder what such a large entity could do to the rest of us living in the cloud.
Imagine, for instance, the IRS moves to the cloud. Tax time will see them expand their demand for resources dramatically for a short period, followed by a sharp drop after April 15. Could that suck all the oxygen out of the cloud-based infrastructure for other cloud-based enterprises? Will there be IaaS providers that will have the ability to have that much capacity available for one quarter a year?
As a system admininstrator myself, I see the writing on the wall. The days of your friendly neighborhood data center, or the server room at corporate headquarters are coming to an end, and so are the jobs of a lot of corporate (and government) sysadmins. Its' time for us to adapt or perish. Exciting times.
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