U.S. federal CIO appeals to cloud companies
The United States’ chief information officer has called on cloud providers to come up with solutions that can be used by the government.
Federal CIO Tony Scott told the Association for Enterprise Information at an event on 30 June that he wants the entire U.S. government to move to cloud not just for data storage or email, but for a new generation of large-scale public facing applications.
While agencies are moving some of their operations onto cloud, he said that progress was fragmented: “Every agency is doing some cloud stuff, but when you go to the core of the matter and the heavy lifting where all the work is done, that’s not moving very fast.”
Scott, who administrates the Office of Electronic Government, later told technology website FCW: “My pitch to the cloud companies is: This is where the money is.”
“The consumer market is great, but there’s some limit to where that goes.”
Scott said he envisions a framework for a “platform baseline” that is applicable to public, private and hybrid systems.
At the moment, he said, the government is working with legacy systems, which is just a computerisation of paper-based workflows, FCW report: “Everything behind the screen is paying homage to just the internal, old-fashioned business model that we engaged in,” he said adding that a move to the cloud, with re-imagined, re-architected business processes “will be a transformative kind of experience. It won’t be a lift and shift of what we have today.”
His comments come after a cyber attack on the Office of Personnel Management is now believed to have affected up to 18 million users.
About Winnie Agbonlahor
Winnie is news editor of Global Government Forum. She previously reported for Civil Service World - the trade magazine for senior UK government officials. Originally from Germany, Winnie first came to the UK in 2006 to study a BA in Journalism & Russian at the University of Sheffield. She is bilingual in English and German, and, after spending an academic year abroad in Russia and reporting for the Moscow Times, Winnie also speaks Russian fluently.
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