Venyu Blog

The term “tipping point” has a range of meanings, “liberally” applied to a wide array of subjects, industries and practices, including:

• Tipping point (physics), the point at which an object is displaced from a state of stable equilibrium into a new, different state
• Tipping point (sociology), the event in which a previously rare phenomenon becomes dramatically more common
• Tipping point (climatology), the point in which global climate changes is difficult if not impossible to reverse change from one state to a new state.

Well, you’d be happy to know that cloud computing has now reached the obligatory “tipping point” at least according to Michael Biddick of Information Week. In his report “Cloud Computing’s Tipping Point” Biddick asserts that when it comes to the U.S. government evidenced in the results of Information Week’s 2011 Federal Government Cloud Computing Survey,29% of respondents say their agencies are currently using cloud services, up 10 points from last year’s survey with another 29% jockeying to begin using the cloud within 12 months. Survey says that cloud computing adoption “could surpass” the 50% mark in the year ahead.

As we’ve documented in this blog the government’s ambitious server compression project, otherwise known as the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (I really like my description better, theirs sounds like it was concocted by some high-paid think tank but as Mark Twain famously said in this context when comparing an idiot with a member of Congress, I repeat myself), the goal is for federal agencies to eliminate up to 800 data centers over the next four years. Biddick rightly concludes it is the “prospect of decreasing budgets, and less money available for IT investments that are driving the economies of scale from shared, centralized infrastructure.” In fact, lowering IT costs is the no. 1 driver behind cloud computing, mentioned by 62% of respondents.

Included in the Information Week report as real-world examples of the success (ala cloud traction) enjoyed by select federal agencies that have already embraced cloud computing:

• The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s financial and acquisition system, dubbed Momentum, has one production environment and four test environments, comprising 25 servers with 10 integrations. The production database, including the failover database, is 2 TB, while the test database is 4 TB. (All are Oracle.) The test database is production-sized and refreshed with scrubbed production data periodically. USPTO is assessing the feasibility of moving Momentum to a cloud environment.
• The Air Force Research Laboratory’s Information Directorate is exploring how cloud technology might be used for cybersecurity mission assurance. Its goal is to see if cloud computing can increase the availability and redundancy of continuous operations.
• The Department of Education is planning to issue an RFP for the operation and maintenance of its Migrant Student Information Exchange, and it’s interested in cloud computing as a potential way of providing those capabilities. MSIX, implemented in 2007, contains records for 97% of the migrant student population, with data from 41 states.
• The Department of Transportation, Federal Aviation Administration, and Air Traffic Organization may explore cloud computing in a test program. This program would provide a virtual production environment that simulates ATO’s production environment, which is spread across a number of facilities. The virtual environment would be used to provide email service and to develop and test software.

Based on the following account maybe the President himself has reached his own “tipping point.”

Thanks to a reporter tweeting for CBS, we now know that the Commander-in-Chief is no fan of the Government IT status quo. In fact, while on the road during a recent fundraiser in Chicago, the President said the “government’s IT is horrible”, and that’s the case across the board, “at the Pentagon, Homeland Security, and the agencies.”

Seems to me that for the feds it’s come down to cloud computing — or bust. I’m putting my bets on the cloud. How about you?