When Farzad Mostashari, MD, took the helm at ONC, he thanked his predecessor David Blumenthal, MD, for a parting gift: the draft ONC Federal Health IT Strategic Plan.
Whether Federal CIO Vivek Kundra’s yet-to-be-named successor will say the same of Kundra's 25-point plan when Kundra heads north to the same Harvard campus to which Blumenthal has returned, well, that remains to be seen.
A feature of that plan is the Cloud-First Policy. At its core, Cloud-First is about consolidating physical datacenters – and reaping the cost-savings, IT and otherwise, that placing those resources into the cloud could realize. But the plan could be pie in the sky if the agencies charged with metamorphosing data centers into clouds lack the understanding and incentive to do so.
[Q&A: ONC's Mostashari on the innovation electronic data will spark.]
Despite the model rolling into some government agencies, a loose collection of cloud computing studies trickling out this spring and summer point to some degree of confusion, with the government lagging the private sector.
The latest, conducted by MeriTalk on behalf of vendor NetApp, determined that government agencies are currently unsure if physical datacenter consolidation is reducing costs or whether they will be able to reallocate any money saved toward cloud computing initiatives. MeriTalk, in fact, found that only one quarter of respondents indicated they planned to do that.
“Agencies are not tracking the metrics that would tell them if closing datacenters actually saves money,” said MeriTalk founder Steve O’Keefe. “Right now, metrics for measuring the value of cloud or consolidation cross so many budget categories, durations, and owners, it is exceptionally difficult for IT leaders to calculate their costs – let alone their savings. It is like counting the number of angel datacenters running on the head of a pin.”
What’s more, MeriTalk’s survey results suggest fewer than half of respondents see incentive to consolidate datacenters.
The savings are not strictly reserved for IT departments, either. For instance, 77 percent of respondents answered that they do not know the Power Use Effectiveness (PUE) across their datacenters.
That’s the rub: If federal agencies don’t grasp datacenter metrics, cannot see the value in consolidating datacenters and they’re not sure related savings can be applied to cloud computing, then Kundra’s plan might lose steam should an equally IT savvy but lesser cloud proponent replace him.
Among the candidates who might be that replacement: Department of Veterans Affairs CIO Roger Baker, United States CTO Aneesh Chopra, General Services Administration’s David McClure, Department of Homeland Security CIO Richard Spires and, from the private sector, typical suspects including Google's Eric Schmidt and Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior. With little more than rumor, however, it is too early to say where that leaves agencies.
“Federal IT leaders agree that Cloud First is the least achievable, least desirable initiative in the 25-point plan,” O’Keefe added. “Kundra’s successor will need to modify the Cloud-First Policy to drive real traction.”
Some federal health agencies are tapping into the cloud, however, and the model has a certain momentum already, says John Pientka, vendor CGI Federal’s vice president of cloud computing, “because the benefits are compelling from both a business and mission perspective – the ability to reduce total cost of ownership, plus the on-demand, flexible, and secure infrastructure and services.”
Even still, without a cloud champion in the Federal CIO office, the government agencies – HHS and the mammoth providers within DoD and VA among the top ten – may lose their way as they move toward closing more than 100 datacenters this year and a lofty total approaching 800 by 2015.
