December’s release of Vivek Kundra’s 25 Point Plan surely gave CIOs a lot to think about over the holiday season.  While the plan validates a lot of what many people have been saying for the last few years, it also puts for the first time a timeframe on some substantial projects for Federal CIOs.  As we watch the year unfold, and the continuing resolution come to an end in March (ok, I don’t want to jinx it), federal CIOs will let loose with their plans and projects to meet Mr. Kundra’s plan.

So do I expect mass change?  Yes, but not really.  The plan asks agency CIOs to identify 3 “must move” services to be moved to the Cloud, all within 18 months.  As with many OMB mandates & e-Gov initiatives from the past, there will be two types of approaches.  On the one hand, there are CIOs who really want to utilize Cloud, IaaS, & SaaS platforms, and then there are those who, succumbing to internal pressure or by their own accord, will nominate “lay-up” projects.  Either way, there is an opportunity over the next two years for federal agencies to make large gains in both efficiency and technical capabilities like never before.  Sure, there will be hurdles and red tape, and the ink is still drying on policies and contract vehicles.  But the tide has started, driven by amazing industry and citizen participation, as well as the cry for Government to save money in all areas possible, but still reach citizens more effectively than ever before.

In the coming weeks, I’ll dig deeper into the 25 Point Plan, but here are a list of Cloud/SaaS/IaaS projects that must be on a CIO’s list for 2011.  You can call them lay-ups if you’d like, but I’d rather call them “strategic victories”.

1. Move your email to the cloud. Period. The end. No argument.
If I look at this problem from a civilian agency perspective, how there is not one single email system across all civilian (non-secret) environments leaves me perplexed.  Email, by far, is the most standardized, non-customized solution in IT.  Ten years ago, most private organizations were moving their email to a managed service model. Ten years ago. Yet all across the federal space, there are thousands of administrators managing, rebooting, and patching email solutions, and quite a few trying to fix broken ones.  With recent large contract awards for Cloud based email; GSA for Google and USDA for Microsoft, the time is now.

2. Search for your public facing website.
OK, the yellow Google box looks great in your infrastructure, we’ll all admit it.  But did you know that Google is not even selling those boxes for website Search anymore?  Move your public facing search to a search service from Google, Bing (Free) or USASearch.gov (Free), and you’ll notice the added benifit of not having that yellow box crawl the living daylights out of your websites.

3. Public Static Websites.
Many agencies still have a ton of web content residing as static content for one reason or another. It clogs backups, gets moved around (slowly) as the infrastructure changes, and runs typically on way more CPUs than is needed.  Yet many times, there is no redundancy for the data, and some of the data is a critical part of an agency’s message.  CIOs usually feel this burn once a website goes down due to a simple equipment failure.  Grab some space and CPUs from Amazon on the cheap, and move that content tomorrow.  When your latest initiative website gets included in President Obama’s State of the Union address, you’ll be happy you did.

4. Website Statistics
Are you chewing weblogs? They keep growing, don’t they? Your fellow system admins want to delete them faster, don’t they?  Upgrade your analytics solution to a tagging based solution such as Webtrends on Demand, Google Analytics, or Omniture, and offload your analytics burden while allowing for instant metrics for you and your customers.

5. Media Hosting
As individuals, we use Cloud based media hosting every day.  Flickr, Snapfish, Youtube, and the list goes on and on.  Yet in the federal space, organizations are still looking to setup large media infrastructures.  With rich API’s, and near zero cost of cloud based media hosting, coupled with advancements like automatic closed captioning services (Youtube), this is an obvious win.

About PrepFire

PrepFire Solutions was founded in 2008 as a Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) with a focus on Cloud, SaaS and COTS solutions.  PrepFire’s goal is to bring the latest technologies to government and commercial organizations – securely and at a lower cost – to better serve their users.

PrepFire’s core capabilities include full spectrum solutions in the areas of cloud computing, SaaS, project management, enterprise planning, security, compliance, network management, CMS and CRM.  But more importantly, PrepFire consultants understand a solution is more than just a set of technical tasks. Every PrepFire solution includes a review of organizational success factors, marketing and communication planning.  PrepFire will not only deliver a solution, they will make it successful. For more information on what PrepFire Solutions has to offer, visit www.PrepFire.com.