Federal CIO Vivek Kundra's recent remarks on cloud computing were awesome. Some highlights:
>> There was a time when every household, town, farm or village had its own water well. Today, shared public utilities give us access to clean water by simply turning on the tap. Cloud computing works in much the same way. However, instead of water coming from a tap, users access computing power from a pool of shared resources. Just like the tap in your kitchen, cloud computing services can be turned on or off as needed, and when the tap isn’t on, not only can the water be used by someone else, but you aren’t paying for resources that you don’t use
>> The Federal Government is the world’s largest purchaser of information technology. We spend over $76 billion annually on more than 10,000 systems in support of more than 300 million Americans. Yet our technology infrastructure is fragmented and inefficient. Over the past decade, the number of Federal data centers has grown from 432 to more than 1,100. This growth in redundant infrastructure investments is costly, inefficient, unsustainable and has a significant impact on energy consumption. In 2006, Federal servers and data centers consumed over 6 billion kWh of electricity and without a fundamental shift in how we deploy technology it could exceed 12 billion kWh by 2011. For far too long, the Federal departments and agencies have operated vertically – creating silos that underutilize skilled workers and vital funds, while producing unimpressive results for the American people.
[cloudTP] Here's where, as taxpayers, we go PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE fix this mess.
>> The economic benefits of cloud computing won’t be realized if every agency independently reviews and certifies solutions. The current fragmented certification process – where agencies independently conduct Certifications and Accreditations on the same products – is redundant, and adds both time and cost to an already complex procurement process. For example, over the last six years, the Department of State spent $133 million amassing a total of 50 shelf feet, or 95 thousand pages, of security documentation for about 150 major information technology systems. We need to shift our focus to real-time security monitoring, rather than generating paperwork.
>> Cloud computing offers transformational opportunity to fundamentally reshape how the government operates, engages the public and delivers services. In the next decade, Federal IT is going to go through a massive transformation, freeing CIOs across the government to focus on serving the American people.