The Homeland Security Department plans to contract with a public cloud provider to host its public-facing websites, said its chief information officer Oct. 5 before an industry audience.

"That's the stated strategy that we have," said DHS CIO Richard Spires during a breakfast event in McLean, Va. hosted by government market analysis firm Input, of Reston, Va.

Spires also characterized DHS's effort to consolidate its 24 data centers into just two privately-managed physical locations as an aggressive private cloud strategy. As evidence, Spires noted that DHS recently signed a contract to convert its email exchange system into a per-seat network-delivered service and a closed similar deal for SharePoint implementations.

"We're not going to worry about what the server configurations are," he added.

Other signs of cloud services at DHS include a new headquarters development and test environment, Spires said. The goal is for programs to set up their development and test environment on virtualized servers within a week, he added.

"I've built a lot of systems in my time. In the government world, it's always kind of disheartening, because you start a new program, what's one of the first things that you do: You get a bill of materials together for your development and test environment. And you go out and procure this stuff and then about eight months later you actually have it in place...Well, you've just lost eight months," he said.

Meanwhile, a DHS effort to rationalize its network infrastructure known as OneNet rolls on. DHS initially envisioned the consolidated departmental network as flat, "but frankly that didn't last long," due to differing information security concerns from DHS components, Spires said. As a result, DHS is building "trust zones" to partition the network into logical segments and should be done implementing them by next spring, he added.

As part of network consolidation, DHS will also establish two enterprise operations centers to give operators an end-to-end view of the network, Spires said. The goal "is to have operators from each of the components be working together in one physical location, right, rather than spread around and try to do it through teleconference, email or chat."

For more:
- listen to Spires speaking at the Oct. 5 Input event

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