Marching Toward The Cloud

“I’m actually looking forward to the day when Cloud is my legacy environment; where it becomes part and parcel of how I’m doing business on a day to day basis; where things like this Web 2.0 applications are part and parcel of our business,” said DISA’s Henry Sienkiewicz.

Sienkiewicz, the Technical Program Director, Computer Services at DISA, talked about how DISA envisions using Cloud Computing during a recent Federal Executive Forum on Cloud Computing broadcast on Federal News Radio.

Joining Sienkiewicz on the panel hosted by Jim Flyzik of The Flyzik Group were:

·         Ronald Bechtold, Army Architecture Integration Center, at Headquarters, Department of the Army, Chief Information Office/G6

·         Curt Aubley, Technology Officer CTO Operations & Next Generation Solutions, Lockheed Martin Information Systems & Global Services

Dale Wickizer, Chief Technology Officer-Public Sector, NetApp, Inc.

Aileen Black, Vice President of Public Sector, VMware Inc.

Sienkiewicz talked about a future where wikis, blogs, mashups are used as critical tools in the daily operational environment for communication inside the department.

He said for the user it’s pretty much self service. For the environment, Cloud Computing provides elasticity. “Security becomes streamlined; it’s very easy and straight forward to bring a new application in -- at least with these widgets and mashups,” explained Sienkiewicz.

What is delivered is transparency on the way that DISA is delivering services. Customers can see what they are doing with real metrics. Now there are real benchmarks for accountability because there’s standardization and homogeneity underneath the environment.

Cloud Constituency

Sienkiewicz said the DISA computing services team is pushing the Cloud inside the Defense Department. “When we are looking at the Cloud, DISA as the institutional provider of computing services for the Defense Department, we are really looking across an entire spectrum of services and changing the paradigm on how we are going and delivering services out to our constituency, whether it’s a Warfighter in the field, or a Warfighter back in the sustaining base, or one of our vendor partners.”

“And we are looking across the entire gamut of cloud. We are looking at Platform-as-a-Service, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Applications-as-a-Service, Software-as-a-Service and Data-as-a-Service.”

That’s quite a challenge for an institutional provider of IT services that has gone through a series of transformations over the last couple of decades, including everything from data center consolidations from 190 plus to today’s 13, to embracing virtualization technologies, to increasing managed services.

“We just see Cloud really as the next iteration on where we are moving on delivering services,” noted Sienkiewicz. “The key component of it all is we are looking at this very much as a service delivery model.”

He explained that DISA managed services contracts use O&M dollars, not procurement dollars. “We are looking at how we allow people to pay by the use.” explained Sienkiewicz. “We are changing that part of the procurement model; we are working very heavily with the development community on defining those standards and best practices so that we can easily move the applications servers into the environment.”

The end result is being able to support the Warfighter better. So across the board we are seeing the Cloud as an enabler and it’s a challenge to us; it’s a good goal Sienkiewicz said.

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Cloud Strong

Ronald Bechtold is the director of the Army Architecture Integration Center, Chief Information Office/G6.

His mission is making the US motto “E Pluribus Unum” a reality for the Army. And he is counting on Cloud Computing to help him accomplish his mission.

The Army is an organization with a long tradition of decentralized execution Bechtold told the Federal Executive Forum audience.

What that means is that individual organizational units were allowed to innovate along their time line in terms of what was best for them. What that resulted in is a very fragmented infrastructure in terms of where Army computing and storage capabilities are.

“What the Army right now is under a massive transformation program. We call this the global network enterprise construct,” Bechtold explained. “What it means in simple plain language is a massive consolidation of our computing and data storage. And why do we want to do that? We want to do that because we need to be able to operationalize the network.”

That means that when a soldier is at Fort Hood and he has to deploy to another location and prepare before he gets deployed, every time he moves he has to reconnect, he gets a new identity, his data files are remapped to a different location and it is the support costs to enable that soldier to do his job is very cumbersome.

“We also have some huge pressures right now with the budget in terms of availability of dollars and we are looking at Cloud Computing as a way to generate some savings so that we can reallocate and reprioritize those funds,” said Bechtold.

“Lastly, if we can do this kind of consolidation we believe the promises of Cloud Computing bring great opportunities to standardize our computing infrastructure and allow us to do a better job of protecting those critical assets in access to our data.”

Marching Towards The Cloud

For the Army, two benefits of Cloud Computing are reducing costs, while increasing agility.

When it comes to cost Bechtold said “right now we have a very inefficient environment where we have computers and servers run by individual organizations running in a probably on average about 20-30% utilization rate. So there’s a lot of excess capacity that can’t be tapped.”

“In addition because of the security concerns historically that we’ve had in the Army, we’ve built applications and mapped them to different computers just to protect ourselves and minimize what would happen if something got compromised.”

What this did was basically magnify the number of computers the Army needed and at the same time increase the number of staff needed to operate and care for these computers. “We are very inefficient. We probably have about on average 20- 30 computers supported by one system admin,” said Bechtold.

“In the world of Cloud Computing you can scale that up, you can have one person for thousands, literally,” Bechtold said. “The reason you can do that is with virtualization and standardization of the internal mechanisms, you can automate a lot of the processes that historically have been manual.”

Bechtold said the biggest challenge we are going to have is how do we re-educate our workforce to take advantage of that. “I expect that when the Army is finished it will probably reduce its IT costs by probably 40%. Now, it’s going to take a few years to get there because we have to change the culture, we have to change our applications, but that’s one of the huge driving factors.”

The second factor driving the march towards Cloud Computing is agility according to Bechtold.

“Frequently we are asked to stand up an organization for a directed mission and there’s a huge support trail to make that happen. So what Cloud gives you is that elasticity to be able to rapidly scale up and add new capacity on demand,” Bechtold explained.

That means no longer waiting hours, it’s instantaneous. Bechtold said that kind of flexibility is needed in today’s world where we have a global reach, where we have depth of these resources anywhere, and we’ve got to expand and contract them on basically no notice.

“I think those are the two most compelling reasons,” said Bechtold.

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Cloud Covered

“We have Platform-as-a-Service, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, public Clouds, private Clouds, hybrid accommodations,” Lockheed Martin’s Curt Aubley told the Forum audience. “We are looking across that whole spectrum depending on what our customer needs are so we can quickly provide that capability that meets their needs.”

As the Chief Technology Officer of CTO Operations & Next Generation Solutions for Lockheed Martin Information Systems and Global Services (LMIS&GS), Aubley and his colleagues have been researching and developing Cloud solutions for more than three years, looking to solve problems that were hard to tackle with current technologies -- often in very creative ways.

Often the most current technology that is hard to tackle is culture.

“There are always cultural challenges when you start to change a new business model and you have that inflection point,” said Aubley. But those conversations are great because every time we talk to our customer we learn something new especially what’s a priority to them.”

Aubley thinks culturally one of the big challenges is are they ready for it? One concern of going to Cloud Computing is the fear among customers that they are losing control because they now have a virtual mainframe.

“You can mitigate that by saying now you have self service, you have more control and more visibility than you ever had,” explained Aubley.

He said on one of their first pilots the first time the customer logged in and they got to see all their finances -- who was using what, what groups were consuming what. They saw they wanted this information. Now the challenge was to deliver it in a form they could use.

When it comes to the future Aubley said “we look at the next generation coming and even soldiers going into the field today, or the airmen, or the sailor, they are bringing their personal fabric with them. And that is that Facebook, My Space, the email accounts they have, their outside, their business, their mission, which is a whole different set of data and privacy.”

“You don’t really want this fabric to touch but the reality is in today’s world, they are. And I’ve seen more of that happening. So I think that in the future we will get to a point that is more seamless. You’ll have a trusted, ubiquitous Cloud that regardless of where you are, smart applications will know where you are, who you are and which fabric you are in. You just get what you need in a trusted fashion so you can get your mission done.”

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Cloud Stewards

Dale Wickizer’s job is to help educate NetApp customers and help them figure out how to be better stewards of their data infrastructure.

“With Infrastructure-as-a-Service now practical to do, I can’t think of a greater time or a greater need for being able to protect your data as all the changes going on,” said Wickizer, who is CTO, Public Sector for NetApp, Inc. “If you have good fallback strategies, you have consistent ways of doing backup so you are protected as well as being more efficient.”

NetApp has been actually the storage providers, the ASDs and what are now becoming Cloud providers for a number of years said Wickizer. He reported that users out there right now using services on NetApp technology and providers say it’s not uncommon to see us drive down costs year-over-year up to 50%.

“That’s not uncommon, that’s actually very commonplace. We are seeing provisioning times moved from months and weeks down to minutes for the whole stack, I’m not just talking storage. With the technologies now on the network, simulators like VMware, being able to take whole applications, the whole stack as well as the monitoring around this, everything like a cell phone provider.”

But as important as the physical efficiencies and the simplicities of the underlying technologies like VMware and Cisco and NetApp are deeply important, I would argue almost more important are the operational efficiencies Wickizer explained.

“With these underlying technologies, it makes it easier to make your operational processes a lot more crisp and repeatable. Take out the ad hoc nature in many of the environments today and if you do that you find you get repeatability Number 1, not only is it more cost effective but you reduce your risk because now you are able to protect things you are able to do things in a more repeatable fashion and that’s a big benefit as well.”

Still Wickizer sees people issues as the biggest challenge to Cloud implementation in government.

“From the top down the existing budgeting process sort of encourages the wrong behavior,” said Wickizer. “Keep your hands of my stash, and governance and so forth. For the people who have the will or the organizations that have the will to push through that, or the determination, I think the payoff is extremely big.”

Those payoffs include having an infrastructure that’s extremely agile, that’s aligned with the business needs and that can respond to the changes in those needs quickly. From a user’s standpoint, they want it now; they want it secure; they want it flexible.

“Have it now and have it quick. Cloud services provide that. I can be confident that it will be secure,” said Wickizer. “I feel confident about what I’m paying for, I can predict what I’m paying for because of the rates and so forth are well published and it gives me flexibility. I can pull together different circumstances to create whole environments when I need them.

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Cloud Underpinnings

Aileen Black, the Vice President of Public Sector, VMware Inc., is not shy about saying these are exciting times for the federal IT community.

“Virtualization and Cloud Computing are really going to allow customers to do more with less. We believe virtualization is the underpinning of Cloud Computing,” said Black during the Federal Executive Forum.
 

“This underpinning allows you to create a fabric across all your resources both internally and externally to provide a presentation of all the resources to the end. It’s almost like taking all the resources both internally and externally and presenting it like a mainframe to the end user community. This allows the government to have better efficiency, better control, and to be more effective in meeting the new needs that are upcoming requirements.”

Black is also not shy when it comes to touting the benefits of virtualization.

“We have agencies that have seen great benefits on efficiency like 30 to 1 consolidation on the average 12 to 1 consolidation on servers. So if you can imagine the amount of cost savings that can be had there, and green savings.”

Black said every server you are virtualizing you take off the floor and lift up to the Cloud you are actually taking equal as a carbon footprint, you are taking a car off the road for 18 months.

“So there are all kinds of different methods of taking control by lifting all those resources up to the Cloud and separating from the hardware paradigm allows us to implement standards at a level very quickly that gives you the agility to actually implement standards across the board.”

It also separates the software from the hardware which gives you the agility and knowledge that hardware upgrades will never slow your project or mission down.

Black also believes that security is always an arms race and that Cloud Computing offers a better way to implement better security practices.

“Virtualization provides very strong isolation characteristics between the different services that are presented to the user community, both from computing resources to network resources,” Black said. “The very strong isolation characteristic of the hypervisor which is the base technology architecture of virtualization is very strong in keeping out or stopping the cross pollination or the issue associated with security.”

Black also talked about the paradigm shift Cloud presents.

“First off, any time you have a paradigm shift like this where you are changing the way that an agency leverages IT you are going to have some cultural challenges,” Black said.

“Let’s face it, Cloud Computing provides choice and that means people have to make decisions. To prepare your team the Number One challenge is making sure they are educated about what the choices are, what the agency’s requirements are and what their constraints are -- both from a security perspective and a privacy perspective.”

The second challenge according to Black is for agencies to make sure that they have a plan, because Cloud Computing is broad and if they don’t actually compute against a plan just like any technology, things will get out of alignment.

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