The divide between cloud computing's early adopters and those struggling to make the shift is largely dictated by an agency's information-technology buying structure, said a Justice Department official June 29 at an AFCEA Bethesda event in Washington, D.C.

"Because of the outsourced nature of the way we do IT infrastructure today, most of our expenses right now are operating expenses," said Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives Chief Information Officer Rick Holgate.

"So, making the transition from our current financial posture, to one that is more reliant on cloud-based services is not quite as transformational as it is for other agencies," he added.

But cloud adoption has not been so straight forward at other DOJ components.

"Unlike ATF, U.S. Marshals has not been forward leading in their technology," said U.S. Marshals Service CIO Lisa Davis. "We're still finalizing and modernizing our [IT infrastructure] backbone."

Davis said the transition to the cloud will likely begin once modernization of current systems is complete. Then it will virtualize some of those systems and, finally, it will determine which of those could move fully to a cloud environment.

"I'm very leery. I'm very concerned about the acquisition piece and also the C&A, which is extremely cumbersome and more time consuming for C&A than C&A for the systems and applications we have today, and leveraging and finalizing FedRAMP so we can certainly minimize the process," said Davis.

U.S. Marshals would like to move its backup data center to the cloud in the next few years and is interested in how employees could access virtualized desktops through their mobile devices. However, said Davis, the procurement office is "chronically understaffed and pursuing cloud technology is "difficult and time consuming."  

"They haven't even started to understand the concept," said Davis. "If I said, 'We're going to put out an RFP on cloud,' they'd look at me like I had two heads."

Even ATF has required some adaptation to the concept of cloud computing, Holgate said. "It hasn't been a huge mental obstacle to overcome," said Holgate, but there is a major education component to knowing what cloud service will work with what architecture. If agencies can get the "acquisition side of the house in order," it will enable a surge in cloud computing, said Holgate.

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