Since announcing his departure from the Federal CIO post, Vivek Kundra has continued driving his ambitious 25-point plan to reform federal IT. The overarching goal is to reduce waste for cost savings – whether that's among the government’s nearly countless individual websites or its many mammoth datacenters.
As Kundra's term working at the White House winds down, rather heavy questions are yet to be answered – and likely won’t be until a successor is named. Last week, Kundra addressed that with more specifics on the progress already made toward the goal of shifting "resources away from duplicative systems and [using] them to improve the citizen experience,” he told The New York Times.
To that end, the federal government announced the closing of 81 datacenters in 2011, with 114 more slated for closure by year’s end, and a total approaching 375 by the close of 2012. The federal CIO’s office, in fact, released a map of duplicative datacenters on the agenda through the end of next year, and used the occasion to point out that they are actually running ahead of schedule.
[Part 1: Will Cloud-First carry on without Kundra?]
Such demonstrable headway points toward momentum that IT analysts say the cloud model has gained inside the government, potentially strong enough to carry Cloud-First forward after Kundra.
Several large government agencies – HHS, DoD’s Military Health System and the CDC among them – currently have cloud initiatives in various stages of planning or deployment.
IDC analyst Katherine Broderick said that government agencies “are quickly catching up to the enterprise with Vivek’s Cloud-First plan. With so many datacenters and such low utilization,” these agencies are ripe for cloud-like transformation.
[Part 2: Cloud-First after Kundra, what tech analysts think.]
Indeed, in his final days Kundra is continuing to lay the foundation upon which not only the Cloud-First Policy but also the superset, his 25-Point Plan to Reform Federal IT, will be built. That’s a legacy someone else will have to continue – or decline to – but Forrester Research vice president and principal analyst Chip Gliedman said that cloud computing’s current kinetic excitement is among the potent drivers in its favor.
“The natural tendency of government is to continue to do what has been done before,” said Gliedman, “unless there is a compelling reason or force to change it.”
