Government 2.0 Club

Notes from the Session “Cloud computing and SaaS service to help Government managers”, Government 2.0 Barcamp, Saturday, March 28th, Room 116 at 3:15pm.

Notes by Julia Begley of Aquilent (julia.begley@aquilent.com/ @JuliaBeeBuzz / http://www.aquilent.com)

Discussion started with identifying existing cloud services and potential tools/services:
Examples of existing tools/services:
- IaaS (e.g. Amazon for surge computation, CDNs)
- RACE at DISA = developer environment
- Forge.mil = full SDLC for Collab / OpenDOD development
- Google Apps
- OpenID protocol

Examples of potential tools/services:
- Provide open availability of data with tools that can be used for cloud computation
- Consolidated directory of government personnel (include POC info and area of responsibility)

Throughout the discussion, we discussed problems and barriers to using these services and solutions to overcome them:

Problems/ Barriers
- Terms of Service
- Policies that limit use of cloud
- Procurement process
- What’s appropriate - choosing “Private” (more of a network with boundaries than “true” cloud) vs “Public” (~”true” cloud) cloud
- IT Security - Certification & Accreditation
- Security concerns
Persistence & Reliability
Data Privacy
Authentication
- Standards would need to be developed, agreed to and used
- Organizational (e.g. resistance to change for many reasons such as to preserve budgets, power, etc.)

Possible solutions to barriers:
- Positive “modeling” - agencies willing to experiment to provide case study to win over resistant elements
- Mandating is problematic and modeling would be a more positive approach
- Establishing standards / schema
Possible to mirror existing solutions
Models available - ProgrammableWeb
- Security
Develop agreed to terms of service, e.g. GSA agreements with Vimeo, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr
Pilot C&A and use results for repeatable processes
Accredit providers for different levels of security
Identify Intermediary / middle man to act as conduit within security parameters
- Procurement
Single place to get access
Intermediary actors could expedite procurement process (agencies / organizations / companies)

#gov20data

Sorry - meant to leave session tag as #gov20cloud