Can Kundra tame the fed's it beast? by Carol Wilson

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Sep 20 2009) Construction , Power and Cooling , Cloud Computing

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   Last week, U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra gave cloud computing a considerable boost – as if it was needed – by saying the federal government will now shift from building large, power-hungry data centers to using cloud computing to support the many IT initiatives needed to address societal problems, including education, health care and energy.

   But Kundra also challenged the industry to provide solutions to security, so that the federal government doesn’t have to be concerned that sensitive information is vulnerable in a cloud computing scenario. And he said the government is very interested in not just emulating what private industry has done with virtual data centers and software-as-a-service, but also using private commercial systems whenever it makes sense to do so, rather than building separate government-owned operations.

   “For far too long, what CIOS across federal agencies have done is, they’ve focused on deploying infrastructure, on deploying data centers rather than solving some of the toughest problems that we face,” Kundra said. “We need to be making sure we are addressing problems around education, and health care and energy and leveraging technologies and making sure that we don’t continue to build when we can leverage what exists in the private sector or what already exists in the public sector.”

   Kundra promised to “lay a new foundation, a foundation built on a model that allows us to procure IT and serve American people at lower cost, at a greener cost and also making sure was we are finding the most innovative solutions to address these problems.”

   In short, Kundra said all the right things, now we have to see how he backs up those words in action.  The U.S. CIO admitted this transition will take time, and he didn’t say what the feds will do with the billions in infrastructure that it already owns. But stopping the $19 million in construction of stand-alone data centers is certainly a good first step, bringing the federal government in line with what private industry is already doing. 

   
   

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