DHS CIO discusses 12 Cloud Services

Richard Spires, CIO of DHS, provided written testimony on 12 services that they have moved to the cloud. The first service often moved to the cloud is email, which DHS has started by putting FEMA’s email to the cloud. They have 8 private clouds already set up, and 3 services in the public clouds.

The private cloud services are below:

SharePoint as a Service – “We are currently migrating Headquarters and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) users to our secure collaboration program.”
Development and Test as a Service – “Establishing development and test offerings in the cloud will have tremendous positive impact on DHS. Currently, DHS has multiple development environments spread across the department and industry locations.”
Infrastructure as a Service – “Complementary to the Development and Test as a Service offering is our Infrastructure as a Service offering to provide virtualized production services, including operating systems, network, and storage, that is consistent with new industry standards.”
Workplace as a Service – “We are working closely with the Department’s other line-of-business chiefs to modernize how DHS employees work. This offering will provide robust virtual desktop, remote access, and other mobile services over the next 24 months.”
Project Server as a Service – “This offering will provide a robust project management platform to publish project schedules that can more easily be shared across offices, divisions, and components.”
Authentication as a Service – “This service eliminated the need for duplicative authentication services, while significantly enhancing the department’s information sharing needs.”
Case and Relationship Management as a Service – “This offering, leveraging Enterprise License Agreements (ELAs), will better enable CRM and case workflows across DHS.”
Business Intelligence as a Service – “The department will leverage this current offering to enhance transparency into departmental programming and expenditures. By the end of FY12, we expect the department will have visibility to information sources across the investment lifecycle, including IT, financial, human resources, asset management, and other information sources.”

The public cloud services are the following:

Identity Proofing as a Service – “We successfully deployed an innovative identity proofing service in the cloud in March 2011.”
Enterprise Content Delivery as a Service – “For the past several years, DHS has used cloud service for Enterprise Content Delivery (ECD) to ensure our public-facing Web sites are always available.”
Web Content Management as a Service – “Within this offering, the Department will leverage open source software hosted in the public cloud and consolidate all public facing DHS Web sites.”

DHS is also hard at work securing both public and private clouds. They are using continuous monitoring and migrating to common controls at DHS data centers. This offers them great visibility over their clouds, ensuring always-on services. DHS is realizing economies of scale through common controls and reducing workload on individual system owners.

DHS is applying FedRAMP controls to public clouds, attempting to cross the “visibility gap” that exists between provider and customer. A commitment to the cloud from DHS offers insight into how federal agencies are moving, and the true value of the cloud in the government. While only a few services are in the public cloud, greater FedRAMP controls and advancement will push more services toward public clouds. Public clouds offer greater maneuverability, cost savings and supplier flexibility than private clouds. They require fewer resources, yet come at the risk of visibility.

Check out the entire Richard Spires testimony here.