This post first appeared on Federal News Network. Read the original article.
| What: | OMB’s Cloud First and Cloud Smart policies |
| When: | Cloud First policy released in December 2010; Cloud Smart policy released in June 2019. |
| Why it matters: | The Office of Management and Budget’s two policies are linchpins to the modernization of federal agency services. The cloud now underpins nearly everything agencies do from improving customer experience to using artificial intelligence to analyzing data to drive decision making. |
The federal government’s move to the cloud didn’t start with the Office of Management and Budget’s December 2010 Cloud First policy or the February 2011 cloud strategy.
The idea of moving data and applications out of an organization’s data center and having it hosted by a third party can be traced back to the 1990s when the term alternative service provider (ASP) first started to appear in the federal lexicon.
But what Vivek Kundra, the Obama administration’s federal chief information officer, did with the Cloud First policy was put a stake in the ground and in the heart of federal data centers.
“What we’ve been doing is we’ve also been thinking about game changing approaches, as far as how we move the federal government toward the cloud. The data centers and the infrastructure investments that have been made over the last decades, unfortunately, are duplicative, and they lead CIOs across agencies to focus purely on infrastructure, rather than thinking about how they can deliver better services to the American People,” Kundra said during a speech at the May 2010 Cloud Computing Forum and Workshop sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.