Enormous opportunities for greater agility, scalability, productivity and cost savings abound when you embrace a “Cloud-First” culture.

If you are NASA CTO Chris Kemp, your agency recently halted RFPs for an ID/IQ contract worth up to $1.5 billion for outsourced Data Center services over multiple years.

That’s great, but NASA still needs the compute power the $1.5 billion buys.

At the same time, NASA is reevaluating its enterprise strategy and cultivating a “Cloud-First” policy; one that Federal CIO Vivek Kundra calls necessary to fully achieve the economic gains of Cloud computing.

So what Kemp needs is a “secret sauce” to change the culture and convince NASA scientists and users to stop and consider: What type of computing experience would make me stop spending scarce resources on new hardware infrastructure?

“The ‘secret sauce’ was listening to our customers, the end users and scientists; then figuring out what computing experience would make them stop buying a bunch of hardware infrastructure and consider the Cloud,” Kemp told On The FrontLines in a recent interview (See page 8).

Kemp said these scientists, researchers and engineers need some high performance computing horsepower and storage at their disposal, but still don’t require supercomputing power.

For these users, their solution is found in NASA’s Nebula Cloud platform, which provides “instant-on” IT infrastructure for rapid application development, deployment and collaboration.

“What we are excited about is the scientist that couldn’t afford to buy the infrastructure they need, because they didn’t get the funding they wanted,” said Kemp.

“But they have a great idea and because Nebula is so inexpensive and accessible to them, think of the breakthroughs that might occur by giving them the compute and storage resources they need.”

A Decade Long Effort

While Nebula is Kemp’s “secret sauce” helping cultivate a “Cloud-First” culture at NASA, the stark reality is that while Cloud services are available and deliver proven IT savings and ROI, a government “Cloud-First” culture must be built over time.

Kundra acknowledged just this in his July 1, 2010 House testimony on moving to the Cloud:

“We recognize that the shift to Cloud computing will not take place overnight…we are still in the early stages of a decade-long journey. As we move to the Cloud, we must be vigilant in our efforts to ensure the security of government information (and) protect the privacy of our citizens…(and) fully consider the advantages and risks associated by defining standards and security requirements.”

The good news is that management—both technical and non-technical—sees the benefits of the Cloud:

·         Its economical pay-as-you-go approach to IT

·         Its flexibility to scale capacity and costs as conditions dictate

·         Its rapid implementation with clear-cut procurement and certification processes

·         Its consistent service and reliability

·         Its effectiveness providing more time for mission-critical tasks.

Plus it is Green and energy efficient because resources are pooled.

So, whether your agency decides to use a public, private or hybrid in the future, rest-assured these benefits will drive a “Cloud-First” culture in government over the next decade.

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