From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov

Transcript for: A Review of Federal Agencies' Move to Cloud Computing

Description: Audio interview by GAO staff with Dave Powner, Director,
Information Technology

Related GAO Work: GAO-12-756: Information Technology Reform: Progress
Made but Future Cloud Computing Efforts Should Be Better Planned

Released: July 2012

[ Background Music ]

[ Narrator: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report; your source for news and
information from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. It's July,
2012. Federal agencies are increasingly moving toward cloud computing
which has the potential to deliver faster services at a lower cost to
taxpayers. A group led by Dave Powner, a director in GAO's Information
Technology team, recently reviewed agencies efforts to comply with the
Office of Management and Budget's Cloud First Policy. GAO's Jeremy
Cluchey sat down with Dave to talk about what they learned.

[ Jeremy Cluchey: ] Let's start out very basic. What is the cloud?

[ Dave Powner: ] Well computing is basically on demand access to
computer services. What cloud computing is, it allows you to acquire
services without actually having the hardware associated with it or data
centers that would host the data so that would all be hosted offsite.
So, one good example would be e-mail services. There's agencies to date
that have several e-mail services in-house and they maintain the
hardware and the data associated with that. Some agencies are moving to
cloud solution where they have a single e-mail service, but they don't
maintain the hardware or the data associated with that—that's all done
externally. So what it allows is a couple of key things that cloud
computing allows. So first of all, it allows for faster delivery of
services to various agencies. It's economical—many times purchasing
services through the cloud is much cheaper than custom-built solutions.
And then it's also flexible because you can also scale. So you can start
small and then scale up because there's those resources, you know, both
hardware and associated computing capacity, that these agencies who
provide the cloud solutions can provide.

[ Jeremy Cluchey: ] And GAO undertook this review of agencies progress
moving forward with OMB's Cloud First Policy. Can you explain this
policy and what it means for agencies?

[ Dave Powner: ] Yeah, the Cloud First Policy is tied to the overall IT
reform approach. I mean basically with IT reform, we're looking at two
major areas of improvement; one to improve large scale acquisitions; and
two, to have operational efficiencies where we're saving money. So the
cloud computing initiative falls within the operational efficiencies
where we can save money. So what OMB required of all agencies was to
take three services that they currently provide and to move them to
cloud by June of 2012. And what we did is we looked at 7 agencies, a
total of 21 services, and determined whether those 21 services were
actually moved to the cloud by June of 2012.

[ Jeremy Cluchey: ] And what did you find?

[ Dave Powner: ] Well we found that the agencies did a very good job
moving those 21 services to the cloud. Of the 21, 18 were moved to the
cloud; U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Small Business
Administration. Department of Agriculture had one that did not and SBA
had two services that were not moved by the June date, but they were
planning to do those soon after the June 2012 date—so that was very good
progress overall. Now, with that, this was really an initiative to learn
about cloud computing—could we do it, what are the challenges, and those
types of things? OMB also required that there would be plans associated
with the migration so you would estimate the cost associated with the
migration, you would have time frames, you would have performance
metrics, and then you would also have a plan to retire systems because
that's really where you get the cost savings. So we looked at the plans
and the retirement plans. What we found is agencies came up short in the
plans. So what we did is we had associated recommendations for them to
look at the services that were migrated to determine whether there were
cost savings associated with this because clearly there's an upfront
cost of moving to the cloud, but hopefully that's offset even more so by
the retirement of legacy systems. One good example is DHS. They're
planning for migrating services to the cloud well beyond the three
services that were required so that's what we would like to see with
many agencies going forward, but also too, to clearly identify the cost
savings because ultimately this is all about saving money.
[ Jeremy Cluchey: ] Your team also identified some common challenges
among agencies in trying to move towards this Cloud First Policy by the
June deadline. Could you talk about those challenges?

[ Dave Powner: ] Yes. Some of the challenges with migrating to the
cloud, first of all security—I mean you want to be very careful that
we're not migrating information that is sensitive—so security is one of
the challenges and we've issued some prior reports on the security
implications of migrating to the cloud. Another one is certifying
accrediting vendors to make sure that we have credible vendors that
we're actually using to provide the cloud services. And then, a third
key challenge is data portability. Do we want the flexibility of moving
to another vendor down the road?

[ Jeremy Cluchey: ] Finally, for taxpayers who are interested in how
their agencies manage their information and how they're spending money,
what's the bottom line here?

[ Dave Powner: ] Well the bottom line with cloud computing and we get
into this a lot with many of our reviews is there's a lot of duplication
that's out there. So this is one effort to reduce duplication of federal
agencies. It's also an initiative that allows you to provide services in
a more cost-effective fashion. So between the cost-effectiveness of
moving to the cloud and reducing duplication, ultimately we can do more
with the taxpayer's money by moving to cloud solutions.

[ Background Music ]

[ Narrator: ] To learn more, visit GAO.gov and be sure to tune in to the
next episode of GAO's Watchdog Report for more from the congressional
Watchdog, the U.S. Government Accountability Office.