The shift to cloud-based technology across government promises many benefits, but the transition will be a cultural challenge, warned Dave McClure, associate administrator at the General Services Administration's office of citizen services and innovative technologies.

"We just created CIOs a couple of decades ago. Many of them now have a lot of power and we're starting to take away all that tangible stuff that they own and say 'Well, we just really need to make sure that we're using services in a way that make a positive outcome,'" said McClure, speaking March 9 at an event hosted by the Coalition for Government Procurement in Washington, D.C.

"We're going to struggle with this for a while," he added.

"Cloud computing is a service. This is fundamentally a shift for government," said McClure, adding that asking agencies to let go of technology and stop overdoing IT will be difficult. It's a very simple concept, he said, but it's much harder to pragmatically implement.

Ultimately, it is a CIO's decision as to what best fits in the cloud environment and how to do it most successfully, in order to satisfy the "cloud first" mandate, he said. Many CIOs are finding that software developing and testing is a ripe area for the cloud. For others, human resources, financial management and collaboration tools are proving to be the best fit, McClure explained.

But, said McClure, "there is a risk posture in moving to the cloud." CIOs need to assess that and be comfortable with the transition, he said, adding that some things will not be movable to the cloud.

Data sovereignty remains the major issue discussed in cloud computing working groups, McClure said. However, McClure said it is not GSA's role to set standards and advise on what service level agreements will best suit particular agencies.

McClure said he and Federal CIO Vivek Kundra want cloud computing to translate to store fronts, agility, simplicity and provisioning. "We want to be able to turn things up quickly or turn them down, do it on demand," said McClure. "We want to be able to scale up quickly--in a matter of minutes and hours, not weeks, months and years."

Currently, GSA is working on power purchase agreements for it's Infrastructure as a service offerings, he said. The organization's cloud-based email options for agencies continues to grow and now, said McClure, it's looking into a geospatial cloud service called the "GeoCloud community platform." He also said GSA, with the help of five agencies, is working on a platform as a service--an open source IaaS.

The next focus for GSA in the cloud will be "the device issue" said McClure, noting that government IT users are accessing information in new and increasingly mobile ways. This will affect the cloud environment and access controls in the future, he said. 

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