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GSA Completes Migration to Google Apps

In July 2011 GSA completed the agency's migration of more than 17,000 employees to Google Apps for Government. This installs cloud-based email and collaboration. Google is now offering its own Collaborative Office Solutions to other agencies to migrate the existing in-house email systems to the cloud. GSA should see a 50% cost savings over the next five years compared with the costs it incurred for the staff, infrastructure, and support of the in-house system.

The key to the GSA migration is the FISMA compliance certification of the Google Apps Premier environment. GSA has also added additional controls in order to meet requirements requested by government agencies.

Cloud computing across the federal government is ramping up thanks to a "cloud first" policy instituted by outgoing U.S. CIO last December. Email and collaboration appear to be the fastest path to cloud computing, as it's one of the first systems deemed cloud-friendly.
Meanwhile the Army chose a private cloud, provided by Microsoft, hosted by the Defense Information Systems Agency. The Navy’s ten billion NGEN acquisition has been placed on a temporary hold until this matter is settled.

SUMMARY
Congress, in legislation just passed, does not accept Army’s plans for moving email to a Microsoft cloud. CIOs will have start making competitive choices between Office 365 and primarily the Google Apps for Business. Whatever the choice, it will be a ten year commitments.

Office 365 combines the email, calendar, tasks, and contacts functionality of Exchange with the document sharing and team collaboration of SharePoint, and the instant messaging, videoconferencing, and meeting capabilities. It is a system that is tightly coupled to Office and hard to separate into separately upgradeable components.

Google delivers its mix of Gmail for Business, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Groups, Google Sites, and other applications entirely online. Google services have been built for Internet-connected teamwork and collaboration, which gives them an advantage. Google touts ease of use, lower cost, and frequent feature updates.

It will require updating the DoD enterprise architecture, at the OSD level, that will take the criteria of email out of the hands of Army and NGEN acquisition executives into a structure that is consistent with long-term cyber operations requirements.

E-mail or Collaboration Systems for DoD?

Achieving interoperability in communications is the stated goal of all current attempts to consolidate e-mail services for DoD. However, tackling only e-mail is insufficient. There is a much larger need for services to support effective collaboration regardless of the user’s technology or location. With increasing dependency on cross-functional communications there is a rising requirement for high quality and real-time global capabilities such as synchronous and asynchronous data connectivity; voice mail; document management; instant messaging; audio and video conferencing as well as support for technical and training support.

When plans are made to achieve DoD-wide standardization of mail communications, provisions must be made for enlarging what are relatively simple features of commodity e-mail to extensions for the large domain of “collaboration” systems. Achieving such interoperability requires a standardization of software and communication transmission formats.

The leading vendors in the existing e-mail and collaboration systems are Microsoft and IBM, though there are at least sixty more firms. There is a large variety of software that is incompatible even across vendor’s own offerings.

Microsoft offers the following: Microsoft Exchange Server and the Microsoft Outlook client; Microsoft Windows Live messenger, office web apps, sky-drive, mail; Microsoft Live Meeting; Microsoft Office Live Communications Server; Microsoft Office desktop tools for collaboration; Microsoft Project Server; Microsoft SharePoint Server and Microsoft SharePoint Foundation; SharePoint Workspace, desktop collaboration application; Microsoft Team Foundation Server, developer collaboration platform.

IBM offers the following: IBM Lotus Notes and Domino; IBM Lotus QuickPlace; IBM Lotus Team Workspace; IBM Quickr; IBM Lotus QuickPlace; IBM Workplace-branded products; IBM Lotus Sametime.

SUMMARY
The task of specifying how DoD should proceed with unification of its cross-service mail communications is more complex than just choosing a standard software suite for e-mail. The mail applications currently in place have already built-in a variety of enhancements to perform some of the collaboration functions.

Though there are other offerings than Microsoft or IBM, such as Google Apps, the task of coming up with an all-inclusive approach to the DoD unified communications now appears to be a formidable challenge.

Problems With the Army E-Mail Migration

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY2012 offers guidelines how the Congress wishes the Army’s e-mail consolidation efforts to be managed. From a policy standpoint, the Act offers detailed instructions what should be done:

1. The Secretary of the Army shall designate the consolidation of enterprise email services as an acquisition program. There would be an Army acquisition executive with decision authority. That role may not be delegated. That is counter to the current arrangement where DISA is performing the program management role.
2. None of the funds for the email consolidation may be obligated or expended until the Secretary of Army submits to the congressional committees a report on the acquisition strategy including certification that existing and planned efforts comply with the existing regulations regarding competitive procurement. This is contrary to the current situation where about 300,000 email seats have been already migrated by DISA as an extension to the existing Microsoft system.
3. The Secretary of Army report must include: A description of the formal acquisition oversight body; an assessment by the acquisition oversight body of the sufficiency and completeness of the current requirements; analysis of competitive alternatives, including commercial offerings; an assessment by the Army Audit Agency to determine what are the cost savings and cost avoidance expected from each of the alternatives; an assessment of the technical challenges in the implementation of the selected approach; completion of a security assessment; a certification by the Secretary of the Army that the selected approach is in the best technical and financial interests; demonstration of the     maximum amount of competition possible in the choice of vendors; a detailed accounting of the current funding expended so far as well as an estimate of the funding needed to complete the entire program.  This additional documentation leaves the Army’s email program without mandated policy-level coverage.
4. The DoD CIO will submit to the Congress: An assessment of how the migration of the Army’s email system to DISA fits within the DoD’s strategic information technology plans; a description of how the DoD CIO would address the email needs of the other military departments for interoperability; what plans are in place to include other military departments in consolidating the email; a description of the degree to which open competition will be used to modernize its entire infrastructure to which the Army is migrating its email services; a description of the roadmap detailing when the DoD enterprise architecture will be upgraded.

SUMMARY
The congressional policy-level instructions regarding the ongoing Army’s email consolidation efforts are detailed in every respect. Congress finds it now suitable to stop further progress as actual migration to a DISA managed environment is progressing. Congress has also imposing demands on the DoD CIO, which are hard to execute without budgetary authority and with current staffing.

Even though the policies, as demanded by Congress, are consistent with prior OSD policy memoranda, their enforcement was never implemented. In the past the Services and Agencies have been able to launch programs based on their own initiatives because the funding was controlled at their level. That was changed in the case with the Army’s email consolidation effort, where the Army and DISA proceeded on the basis of bilateral agreements, without policy cover from OSD, OMB or Congress.

The Army will find it difficult to comply with the elaborate list of Congressional demands.  There still remain technical issues whether the current rapid pace of implementation is within the capabilities of DISA and its contractors.

Congress now added to an Army problem the demand on the OSD CIO to also consider the consolidation of email for all of DoD as well as the upgrading of the DoD enterprise architecture.

It appears that the existing partially implemented Army email solution is facing insurmountable obstacles in proceeding. The outcome is not certain.

Congressional Directions on Reducing DoD Data Centers

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY2012 offers new guidelines how the Congress wishes IT spending to be managed. From a policy standpoint, the Act offers one of the most detailed instructions. The following are the most significant provisions:

1. No funds may be obligated for any information systems technology used in a data server farm or data center unless first approved by the DoD CIO or a component CIO.
2. No funds may be obligated to deploy any information systems technology unless it is in accordance with standards set by the DoD CIO.
3. Secretaries of the military departments and the heads of the Defense     Agencies shall submit to the DoD CIO plans to reduce the square feet devoted to data centers, to increase in multi-organizational utilization of data centers, to reduce the number of applications running within data centers, to reduce the number of personnel, and to reduce labor costs in operating data centers.
4. The DoD CIO shall specify the performance standards and measures that will be used in the plans submitted to achieve stated cost reduction objectives. This will include: desktop, laptop, and mobile device     virtualization; transitioning to cloud computing; migration of DoD data centers to cloud services at a lower cost with same or greater degree of security; utilization of private sector-managed security services for DoD data centers; transitioning to just-in-time delivery of Department-owned data center through infrastructure (space, power and cooling) services.

SUMMARY
    The NDAA is one of the most specific policy guidelines that have been ever stipulated by the Congress. It strengthens the role of the DoD CIO and defines the metrics for monitoring progress towards the objective of reducing the number of data centers for the purpose of realizing cost savings.

It remains to be seen how quickly can DoD extricate its processing from the existing proliferation of data centers. The ultimate performance indicator will not be the number of discrete data centers – a count that can be manipulated – but the net reductions in manpower and cost.

The Cloud Marketplace

With the attention and publicity presently devoted to cloud computing it is important to grasp the importance of the cloud marketplace. Globally, the number of cloud firms has grown into thousands as existing computer services firms are changing to “cloud computing” as a more attractive label.

Worldwide public cloud spending is $89 billion in 2011, an annual increase of 20%. Nevertheless, that is only 6% of the total computing hardware, software and IT services costs. Though cloud spending is the fastest growing component of IT, it remains relatively minor at this time. (1)

The largest share of cloud computing is in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). It has thirty major players, both pure-play outfits that provide pay-as-you- go, on-demand computing capacity, and those that are rising into the cloud from the traditional managed services by offering limited cloud features.

IaaS is a form of outsourcing computer processing for hired hosting. It includes network access, routing services and storage. The IaaS provider will generally provide the hardware and administrative services needed to store applications and will provide a platform for running applications. Scaling of bandwidth, memory and storage are generally included as a part of more sophisticated IaaS offerings. Vendors compete on performance and pricing.

The leading IaaS firms are: Amazon EC2; BlueLock vCloud; Enki Computing Utility; Enomaly Elastic Computing Platform; Flexiscale;  Force.com; GoGrid Cloud Hosting; Google App Engine; Iomart Hosting;  Joyent Cloud; Layered Tech; Microsoft Windows Azure; Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network; Rackspace Cloud; Terremark Enterprise Cloud; V-Cloud Enterprise; VMware vCloud. The dominant IaaS firm is Amazon EC2 that occupies close to half of this marketplace.

There are also at least forty platform-as-a-service (PaaS) providers who help developers build applications faster by including automatic features and functions that otherwise the customer would have to provide. PaaS is an environment provides operating-system level services for accessing hardware resources that are needed in a cloud and therefore can support applications with lesser involvement by customers.

The leading PaaS firms are often identical as the IaaS firms. The leading firms are: 3tera's AppLogic; Amazon EC2; Flexiscale; Force.com; Google App Engine; IBM CloudBurst; Intuit Partner Platform; Joyent Smart Platform;  LongJump; Microsoft Windows Azure; Morph Labs; Rackspace Cloud;  RighScale Cloud Management Platform; Terremark vCloud Express; Wolf Frameworks; Xen Cloud Platform.

At the top of the cloud hierarchy are software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies. There may be more than two thousand such firms. Individually they occupy only small shares of a small but rapidly growing market. For example, by far the largest SaaS player, the totally proprietary Salesforce.com, owns only 8.7% of the total SaaS market. Other big names – Amazon, Intuit, Cisco, Microsoft and Google - were all below 5% each. That leaves everyone with only tiny market shares today. The most likely pattern of the industry will be to develop a few large concentrations of computer processing power that will be supported with a many firms that have proprietary market knowledge.

The leading SaaS provider is Microsoft with license fees and .Net proprietary Office 365 (with e-mail, calendars, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint and Lync). The other leader is Google, with Google Apps as a cloud-based solution connecting with any device on any operating system and largely free of license charges (with e-mail, calendars, a word processor, presentations, drawings, a Website, collaboration features, chat, video storage plus access to over 100,000 applications). Both Microsoft and Google SaaS are Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) certified.

In all SaaS cloud applications uptime is critical. We have reliable information only about Gmail, which was up 99.984% of the time inclusive of scheduled downtime. This translates into an average of seven non-consecutive minutes of downtime per month. This compares favorably with commercial on-premise email that averages 3.8 hours of downtime per month.

SUMMARY
Cloud operations should be viewed as a rapidly emerging business. With its growth rates it will most likely become the dominant form of how firms will organize their IT operations. As the need for computing applications grows at a rate that is more rapid than for any other technology, the limits on adoption of cloud computing will be dictated by the lack of qualified personnel to enable the transition into a totally different way of organizing computing services.

In the next few years there will be a large shake out taking place because economies of scale in processing that favors large enterprises. However, the large provides will depend on support from many firms that have specialized knowledge for narrowly defined markets.

The technical capabilities for advancing into cloud computing are rapidly emerging and are largely available now. Therefore the limits on growth in the next ten years will be managerial and not technological. The roles of the Chief Information Officers will change from implementation of IT systems, which will be left to cloud computing firms, to organizing the integration of a diverse group of suppliers to support competitive improvements.


  (1) http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1735214

Do We Need More Policy Guidance from OMB?

Is the OMB policy guidance adequate to direct where and how to spend Federal government IT money as the pressures for the reduction in budgets keep rising.

OMB reports IT FY2011 spending for the Federal government as $79 billion. However that number does not include spending for 58 independent executive and judicial agencies. In the case of DoD, which accounts for close to half of Federal IT spending, the payroll costs of the uniformed and civilian payroll are excluded.

The DoD IT budget also excludes costs included in operational systems such as command and control applications that are embedded in weapons. Whereas in the past embedded systems were separate from general support applications, in the coming era of cyber warfare all systems must be viewed as interoperable components. Providing security protection for all DoD systems has become an over-riding requirement.

With current DoD IT spending estimated as over $40 billion, or 7% of the total, the DoD exceeds IT spending for even the largest commercial firm by a large multiple. A comparable ratio for large commercial firms is under 3%. Therefore the top-level policy guidance to steer such a massive expenditure is of critical importance. It is not only the total amount that matters but also its quality in supporting national security missions.

The DoD IT costs are listed in over 2,000 investment projects. As compared with commercial practice this is a high number because commercial enterprises are able to spend more on operating costs and less on new investments. Commercial firms spend money on a steady stream of continuous upgrades to systems that are already in place. There is no need to make new long-term investments because systems depend on a steadily upgradeable architecture. The Federal Government does not have an upgradeable architecture. DoD, its largest component, is notorious by reliance on a fractured systems environment that is not easily upgradeable, is not integrated and it no interoperable.

 For instance, DoD has 1,536 separate development programs for improving the management of information technologies. Consequently, it finds itself continuously re-inventing and re-building improved structures, which are nevertheless conceived as independent ventures.

The Office of Management and Budget in the Office of the President OMB plays a key role in overseeing how federal agencies manage their IT investments. The source for this oversight is data about an agency’s investment portfolio (Exhibits 53) and about capital assets planning (Exhibits 300). Additional web based “dashboards” summarize information about diverse projects.

OMB does not provide architectural or operational oversight over IT spending for ongoing operations but focuses only on a limited number of large development programs. OMB and federal agencies have concentrated on duplicate IT investments. Most of these efforts have not yet demonstrated cost reductions. In the absence of an overall enterprise plan it is not possible to disentangle conflicting initiatives.

The limited progress in managing Federal IT for greater efficiency can be traced to a lack of a coherent Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA). When originally proposed in 1999, the FEA was intended to provide federal agencies with a common architecture, which would allow the coordination of common business processes and which would facilitate consistent system investments. No progress was made.
As part of the fiscal year 2004 budget cycle, OMB required agencies to align proposed IT investments to new FEA reference models to guide the initial process improvements. Agencies then set up organizations to deliver agency-wide enterprise architectures, which would define IT investments. In FY 2011 the OMB Chief Architect reported that changes to IT investments are still in the planning stage.

At present the actual progress in aligning IT spending according to an enterprise blueprint does as yet not show progress according to the most recent GAO Report to the Congress (GAO-11-826).

So far the policy directions for the Federal IT spending have focused primarily on the closure of data centers. While the consolidation is proceeding, verifiable net cost reductions are not available because this effort concentrates on the savings in the number of servers through virtualization, where the net savings have long paybacks.

OMB has also announced a “Trusted Internet Connection” initiative to improve security by reducing and consolidating external network connections. However, none of the 23 participating agencies have as yet met all of this initiative’s requirements.

A major new program from OMB is the FedRAMP project, which is to provide continuous security monitoring of cloud computing systems for multiagency use. This project is currently behind schedule, and has not yet defined all performance metrics.

The FedSpace project, which is to provide federal employees and contractors with collaboration tools for cross-agency knowledge sharing, is also behind schedule and has not defined its performance metrics.

SUMMARY
The policy guidance for directing the missions of IT must rise to the challenges that are now emerging, especially with regard to security assurance of all systems. Ultimately, policy is directed by Congress and then transmitted via the OMB as a redirection how funds should be spent. There is no question that we must start receiving more guidance because what we have received so far is not adequate.

Computers That Understand What You Say

A smart-phone that engages in conversations is the next disturbance that will dictate how DoD will have to revise its information management practices.

DoD planners will have to include in their investment programs the availability of tactical consumer radios costing less than $300. The first firm to launch such technology is Apple with its iPhone 4S. It offers intelligent conversational capability. No other consumer computer firm has ever offered that before. We can be sure that other vendors will follow with similar products.

The iPhone 4S device is the first device that offers a reasonably capacity to perform natural language processing using semantic methods. Apple has applied computational linguistics to make it possible for the conduct of unstructured verbal and text exchanges to take place between computers and humans.

The application that does that is called SIRI. It depends for its capacity to talk back on semantic software that depends on its linguistic capability by extracting the meaning of word from the Apple cloud. Though SIRI still has problems responding to unusual requests, there are now a huge number of programmers who are enhancing the vocabulary of interactions while SIRI keeps “learning” from millions of conversations.

Over the past 20 years there have been many attempts to endow computers with a conversational capability. This involved the use of complex and very expensive special purpose hardware and software. What makes SIRI different is its reliance on packaging into a combination of conventional as well as innovative features that makes it possible to engage in simple conversations. The shirt-pocket sized iPhone include not only fully featured e-mail, office applications, calendars and an unlimited number of business applications but also a camera, a video recorder, GPS, geography-tagging, a compass, a gyro, a proximity sensor as well as face identification features.

Apple packed into a 4.9 oz. device UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA (850, 900, 1900, 2100 MHz); GSM/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz); CDMA EV-DO Rev. A (800, 1900 MHz); 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi (802.11n 2.4GHz only) as well as Bluetooth 4.0 wireless. This makes the iPhone cover a spectrum of frequencies. It can be encrypted for security protection.

SIRI will talk in US and UK English (U.S.), Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), French, French (Canadian), French (Switzerland), German, Italian, Japanese (Romaji, Kana), Korean, Spanish, Arabic, Catalan, Cherokee, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, Flemish, Greek, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

DoD planners can view the iPhone 4S as a harbinger of a revolutionary new approach how people will interact in the cyber sphere. Other manufacturers will be entering into a new technology race. The issue will be which of the many competing public clouds can support their respective devices with a superior capacity to conduct intelligent conversations without delays.

DoD information architecture will have to start adopting systems that will support person-centered applications. Though business applications may remain operating in the existing mode for a time, natural language applications should be focused on meeting the warfighter’s tactical needs. New systems should be able to offer the capacity to:
To recognize the context of commands;
To cope with inquiries that ask for summaries of complex data;
Respond to silent texting, without keyboard inputs;
Allow for terse communications about missions and objectives;
Combine GPS, geography and intelligence information;
Deliver situational awareness to individuals;
Collect photo and video intelligence;
Connect to diverse applications to obtain instant answers;
Recognize diction characteristics of a sender;
Use face recognition as means for biometric identification;
Deal with multiple frequencies make it a software defined radio;
Handle multiple languages for automatic translation of conversations;
Track all communications and assign identity to an individual.

All of the linguistic intelligence of SIRI-like devices will remain, for several decades to come, on central clouds that house petabytes and even exabytes of semantic relationships. This must be available in real-time.

Semantic methods depend on an examination of millions of sentences to extract from communications relationships between the syntax of questions and the mostly likely context in which a word or a sentence have appeared before. This requires the uses of extremely fast parallel computers that will have to subdivide the task of finding the right answers.

To maintain a 100% reliable connection between local cell-phone devices and the central repository of semantic intelligence, DoD will have to depend on the availability of a multiplicity of “on the edge” servers. This is especially necessary in the case of deployment of expeditionary forces.

SUMMARY
The availability of personal communicators that can hold conversations is a major breakthrough in the evolution of computing. Time has come for DoD planners to prepare for that. Intelligent communications will require different data centers and different networks.




IPv6 Migration Takes Longer, Is More Difficult

We have a report from the Google development organization that they have been trying to convert, since 2008, internal systems from IPv4 to IPv6.(1) Google has 200 offices worldwide, serving about 30,000 employees. So far only 95% of Google has been converted.

Google has learned that an IPv6 migration involves more than just updating the software and hardware. It also requires buy-in from management and staff, particularly from busy administrators. It requires a lot of work with vendors to get them to fix buggy and still-unfinished code.

The number of seat converting to IPv6 is limited. Google’s development organization is centrally managed and does not have the administrative problems that are likely to be encountered in other organizations.

SUMMARY
If a sophisticated firm, such as Google, is taking more than three years to perform IPv6 migration, the prospect of DoD achieving this result in the foreseeable future is questionable.

DOD IPv6 Policy was released, June 9, 2003. GIG transition was to be completed during FY 05 to FY 07. After 2008 IPv6 would be a mandatory standard. DISA was directed to acquire, manage, allocate, and control necessary IPv6 address space for DOD. The IPv6 conversion goals have not been met so far.

Meanwhile, continuation with the IPv4 protocol continues to be viable. (2) How long can DoD persist without upgrading of its protocol is a question that needs to be addressed? New DoD systems continue to be developed at the rate of over $10 billion/year. New applications need policy-level guidance how to proceed with the inclusion of IPv6 protocols because it will have to be implemented ultimately.


(1) http://www.itworld.com/networking/231929/usenix-google-deploys-ipv6-internal-network
(2) http://pstrassmann.blogspot.com/2011/04/status-report-on-ipv6.html