How CIOs are responding to demands to save money. Milwaukee CIO turns to cloud computing, mainframe outsourcing and thin clients amidst budget cuts |
Milwaukee County’s CIO, Dennis John is facing huge budget cuts for his 2010 budget which requires cutting 400 IT and related jobs. In response he is planning increased us of cloud computing, outsourcing mainframe staff, as well as replacing some 4,500 desktops with thin clients beginning next year. This plan is in reaction to a predicted $2 million budget cut being planned by the county according to an article on Network World. |
| Thin client usage remains small, but Gartner Inc. forecasted earlier this year that thin client terminals and diskless/repurposed PCs will comprise 10% of all professional client devices by 2014.Read more at wistechnology.com |
Government Steps Into The Cloud
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In its first iteration, Apps.gov consists strictly of software-as-a-service applications or other Internet services.
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In its first iteration, federal computing in the cloud consists strictly of software-as-a-service applications or other Internet services.
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| The applications first available at Apps.gov Tuesday featured known social networking options such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. For customer relationship management, recruitment, and project management, Saleforce.com apps were prominent. Google Docs and other on-line apps were also available under the productivity applications category.
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To investigate the way private suppliers of cloud services can be substituted for building more government data centers, the administration will seek funding for pilot cloud projects in next year’s budget. It will seek to set standards and policies to be able to begin implementing cloud services by 2011, Kundra said.
Read more at www.informationweek.com |
Government Embraces Cloud Computing, Launches App Store
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Cloud computing is coming to government agencies, bringing the hope of cost savings, greater efficiency, and innovation.
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| , federal CIO Vivek Kundra said that the government cannot continue to invest in traditional data centers to support its IT needs, citing a doubling in the energy cost at federal data centers between 2000 and 2006.
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| Of the $76 billion the government spends annually on IT, $19 billion he said goes toward infrastructure maintenance. Government CIOs, he said, are more focused on deploying infrastructure and data centers rather than solving problems like education and healthcare.
Cloud computing, said Kundra, can simplify acquisition, budgeting, policy planning, and architecture. And to help that happen, he announced the launch of Apps.gov, a GSA-operated Web site that government agencies can use to buy and deploy cloud computing applications.
Read more at www.informationweek.com |
Gov 2.0: Cloud Computing As Government Panacea |
Two of the most influential people in the cloud computing market — Amazon CTO Werner Vogels and General Services Administration CIO Casey Coleman — talked today at the Gov 2.0 Summit about cloud computing’s high potential as a cheaper, better way of delivering IT resources. Such enthusiasm, however, is tempered with lingering questions about security, interoperability, and organizational barriers. Read more at www.informationweek.com |
Announcing The Global Governmental Cloud Computing Roundtable |
I am happy to announce my involvement as both instigator and moderator in an upcoming roundtable discussion on Global Governmental Cloud Computing coordinated by Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada (DFAIT) and GTEC 2009 on October 6th in Ottawa, Canada.
The purpose of this by invitation meeting is to provide an international forum for leading government CIOs and CTOs to discuss the opportunities and challenges of implementing cloud computing solutions in the public sector. We expect a total of 20 to 25 leading international government representatives to participate in the discussions. Read more at govit.sys-con.com |
Michigan Plans New Data Center and Government Cloud |
Within weeks, Michigan will take the first step toward building a massive data center designed to provide cloud computing services to state agencies, cities, counties and schools across the state.
Michigan’s Department of Information Technology will release a request for information (RFI) in September to gather ideas and gauge industry interest in forming a public-private partnership to build and operate the facility, according to state CIO Ken Theis. The state intends to break ground on the data center project in October 2010.
“This is really big for us,” said Theis, in an interview with Government Technology. “It could potentially be an 80,000- to 100,000-square-foot data center. And we’re not only looking at it from a shared-services and cloud computing perspective, we’re also looking at this for economic development.” Read more at www.govtech.com |
U.S. Agencies Think About Establishing Cloud Nodes |
Tim Grance, program manager for cyber and network security at National Institute of Standards, says standards are essential to cloud computing. And among those standards must be additional standards for moving virtual machines from cloud to cloud, something we still lack. |
“One of our key metaphors around here is a reference implementation–create a common vocabulary around a reference implementation,” he said. If the reference implementation proves itself and passes muster, then federal agencies could proceed, each with its own full implementation. The reference implementation would assure that what worked in one agency’s cloud would probably work in another’s, even if all the details weren’t the same. Read more at www.informationweek.com |
Public And Private Cloud Computing in Government: Balancing Act or Battlefield? |
Yesterday I had a great conversation with a European client who is tasked with identifying a roadmap for government departments across his jurisdiction to collectively benefit from cloud services. The starting point for him – like for a number of other clients I have been talking to lately - is (1) a set of ongoing consolidation and virtualization initiatives involving departmental data centers and (2) the desire of benefiting from the “on-demand” model of cloud computing to better utilize both infrastructure and applications. |
Our conversation touched upon a number of important issues: |
| the never-ending private-vs-public cloud argument, |
| how to strike the balance between the provider and the user view in a context where several agencies run or control their own infrastructure and may wish to “sell” excess capacity to others |
What If Government IT (Spending) Vanishes In A Cloud? |
But what about the impact on IT organizations in government? In a previous post I touched upon how budget constraints are driving many to consider the adoption of cloud-based services at the infrastructure and at the application level. |
Let’s assume that a fair portion government agencies in all tiers of government meet their computing requirements by using a combination of public and private cloud services. This is likely to happen first for hardware infrastructure (computing power, storage, network), followed by software infrastructure (such as email, middleware, content management, database management systems) and standard applications (financial management, HR, procurement, payment-processing). |
Unlike in the commercial sector (where competitive pressures prevail), over the last few years I have noticed an increasing interest for sharing these applications among government organizations. Bespoke applications procured by a government organizations are more and more freely available to others, while some agencies are actively considering the establishment of communities of peers to jointly develop and support applications (what Gartner calls “community-source”). At the same time, the adoption of cloud-based infrastructure will push more of these domain-specific applications – both commercial off the shelf and community source – toward a software-as-a-service, off-premise delivery model. Read more at blogs.gartner.com |
Schools in Brunei enter the cloud |
Students and teachers in Brunei will be given cloud-based email accounts by the end of this month, opening up opportunities for collaborative learning in the future.
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Setting up email accounts is part of the Microsoft Live@Edu Programme, which has collaborative tools for students and teachers to participate in online tutorials and discussions, collaborate on assignments, share calendars and workspaces.
Read more at www.futuregov.net |
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Milwaukee CIO turns to cloud computing, mainframe outsourcing and thin clients amidst budget cuts
