In U.S. federal government concept of a “Cloud First” began and spread into commercial sector. Is it a feasible option for any organization? Some success stories worth considering:
Cloud First was mandatory declared by chief information officer of United States to all federal agencies in December 2010. More than half of all federal agencies had taken cloud computing for one application at least showed in Congress report by 2012.
An earlier government IT initiative the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI) was followed by Cloud First mandate. FDCCI has tracked 1,000 federal data centers that have closed till date or are scheduled to close in 2014. Cloud delivered applications are direct result of cloud delivered applications.
Cloud First has its share of detractors, instead of apparent government success including HealthCare.gov trouble-prone launch. Studies quoted by Detractors indicates agencies don't move cloud fast. On scarcity of federal technical expertise in cloud installation lead to blame slow adoption.
In Government Sector Success of Cloud
There are many examples of productive cloud installations within federal government, include following examples:-
- U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA): This helps in moving email to public cloud with more than 100,000 employees. Simultaneously, an internal private cloud was run by it and enhanced by other entrepreneur solutions. Internal/external cloud constructs saved USDA $75 million in its first three years.
- Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (RATB): American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 has created RATB to track stimulus spending. RATB was able to save $854,800 in two years after migration of Infrastructure as a Service on public cloud.
- Bureau of Alcohol,Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives(ATF): For production of huge agencies cloud platform don't have to be implemented. With 4,700 employees, ATF was able to save $1 million a year after moving email to cloud.
Success of Cloud in Commercial Sector:
One company made a strong move into cloud is Veyance Technologies, a 6,000-person manufacturing firm based in Ohio in commercial sector. Veyance IT group supported about 120 applications for its size typically and variety of operating systems on multiple servers in hosted locations allow to run those application.
According to CIO John Hill, Veyance wanted to stay away from its multi-local, siloed architecture to enable company to operate as a “true global entity.” A traditional IT infrastructure very well know to limit this ability, Hill entered on Cloud First campaign of its own type. Veyance applications moved to Virtustream, a cloud-based service provider specializes in business applications such as SAP. Every form of migration application is available: physical-to-physical, virtual-to-virtual, physical-to-virtual and even brute-force data migration heterogeneous.
Nearly 100 workers and dozens of vendors completed in less than seven months, on budget with no unplanned downtime. Impressive results are delivered by full cloud migration: in hosting costs a 30% reduction is there reduced equipment, labor and licensing costs with increase in significant capacity. When information silos were removed, to streamline and coordinate global operations was capable by Veyance and overall productivity and collaboration was improved.
Moving Forward in Cloud:
- Choose providers with care : Service provider is “enterprise-focused” and provides “robust support” for many enterprise scenarios regarding cloud computing.
- Inventory is key : There is need to “know user environment”. An extensive inventory is performed to define unknowns or dependencies.
- Standardize : Company properly standardize on server, network technologies and storage which are highly scalable and high-performance.
- In migration and colocation look for expertise : Complex migrations can be managed work with providers and workloads can be colocated that won't be moved to cloud.
