DHS plots cloud strategy

The Department of Homeland Security is hard at work consolidating two dozen data centers into two virtualized locations in Virginia and Mississippi by 2013. The agency will use this consolidation as a launch pad into shared services and a private cloud strategy, Keith Trippie, executive director of DHS' enterprise system development office, told an Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association breakfast panel in Bethesda, Md., last week.

Trippie said the DHS cloud will be serving up SharePoint and enterprise email before the end of fiscal 2010. To carry this out, DHS already has received $150 million for 2010 that covers data center development and migration efforts. The strategy  falls in line with plans outlined by Federal CIO Vivek Kundra, who has cited cloud computing as a key to driving down IT costs in the federal government.

"When you have consolidated data centers as parts of your enterprise strategy, the next thing is looking at the enterprise services you want to build in there," Trippie said. "We're looking to try to get capabilities on the ground sooner than in the past, so elasticity and on-demand serving are going to be principles as we move forward."

Trippie added that DHS has plenty of challenges in going forward with this plan. Those include security and making sure any services focus on customers. DHS also has the unique challenge of having been created from merging 22 different agencies.

Unless the new terrain is built carefully, "the Websprawl of five years ago may be cloudsprawl of five years from now if we do not make it easy for people to do business with us" Trippie said, referring to a massive build-up of disparate federal Websites that has only recently begun to change.

For more on the DHS cloud plans:
- see this InformationWeek article

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