“Cloud” computing may be all the rage these days. But several county IT leaders say they didn’t hop on the bandwagon to be trendy. It’s helping them work smarter and at lower costs, according to early adopters.
In the cloud, services and data — think word processing, e-mail and calendars — are hosted over the Internet rather than residing on a user’s desktop computer or the county’s local server. The cloud’s computer-processing infrastructure could be hundreds of miles away.
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Photo courtesy of Oakland County, Mich.
Tim Shepherd, a member of Oakland County, Mich.'s IT team, at work in the county's server room.
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Larimer County, Colo., Oakland County, Mich. and Klamath County, Ore. are among the counties who have taken the plunge, enabling them to save money and reassign IT staff resources.
“Outsourcing the whole e-mail infrastructure is going to save us, on average, $10,000 a year amortized for the servers that we won’t have to buy,” said Andy Paratore, Larimer County’s chief information officer. “On the system admin and tech support ends, on the IT staff side, we think we’re going to save between a half to three-quarters of an FTE.”
The county recently switched to Google’s cloud applications for e-mail, instant messaging, calendars and video conferencing, becoming the first Colorado county to do so.
Trendiness had nothing to do with it; the decision was a practical one. “I wouldn’t say we’re an early adopter because we’re really progressive; it’s more of a timing thing,” Paratore said. The county’s aging, 14-year-old GroupWise system needed to be replaced.
Klamath County was Microsoft’s first government client. It’s been using Microsoft’s cloud-based apps for more than a year, said IT Director Randy Paul. “I never presented it as, hey, this is a cool cloud-based computing solution. It was basically a simple lease-versus-buy financial decision,” he explained. Klamath County made the switch in June 2009, and Paul said his return on investment has been about 50 percent. Both counties conducted pilots with groups of employees before converting to the cloud.
Cloud computing has generated a lot of buzz among local government IT executives and the technology community, according to the Public Technology Institute (PTI), a technology organization whose members are cities and counties.
Forty-five percent of city and county governments who responded to an April 2010 PTI survey are currently using cloud computing to maintain applications or provide services. Nineteen percent plan to use cloud computing services within the next 12 months, while 35 percent have no plans to move to the cloud.
Alan Shark, PTI’s executive director, said two factors may be responsible for the uptick in interest. One is the economy. “The budget process is causing people think differently,” he said. Phil Bertolini, Oakland County’s CIO and deputy county executive, said in the 10 years he’s been with the county, the IT budget has “been flat or reduced” every year.
Secondly, advances in technology are causing people to think differently. “The choices that we have did not really exist in any meaningful way three or four years ago as they do today,” Shark added.
While cloud computing is increasing in popularity, it is, in a sense, nothing new. “As the definition has expanded, people have realized that in many cases they have been in the cloud the last couple of years,” Shark said. His organization’s membership software system is “essentially” cloud-based, in that its database can be accessed from anywhere via the Internet.
In an older incarnation of “the cloud,” Bertolini said, his county has been delivering technologies to its local municipalities for more than 35 years, over the county’s fiber-optic network that connects 62 cities and towns.
“Across the network itself, we provide them high-speed Internet and e-mail services at no cost,” he said. The “county cloud” also provides public safety systems to 200-plus public safety agencies in six counties in southeast Michigan, and systems for land address management and animal licensing. “When you think about the cloud, you can go back and wonder: ‘Was the mainframe originally a cloud?’” he said, referring to the days when office workers had so-called “dumb” terminals on their desks connected to mainframe computers.
Bertolini isn’t averse to using vendors, but he favors a hybrid “government cloud” — partly for reasons of security — where an outside company could operate cloud services from inside a government’s data center. “Other governments would consume it knowing the data’s stored here at Oakland, or stored at the state of Michigan or stored somewhere else,” he said.
“If I were to say here in Oakland County, we’re just going to have Google host all our e-mail, the first people that would stand up and wave their hands at me would be law enforcement.”
That’s been the case in the city of Los Angeles, which is moving its 30,000 employees’ e-mail to Google’s online applications. The $7.25-million project was to have been completed by the end of June, according to the Los Angeles Times. It was delayed because of the L.A. Police Department’s concerns about data security. California state law requires that police data be encrypted and employees with access to the data have background checks. Google has been working to address their concerns.
Klamath County’s Randy Paul said he had no overriding concerns about security and is satisfied with the assurances his vendor has provided. “In e-mail, our policy is, for example, we shouldn’t be sending HIPAA data or confidential case information over e-mail in the first place,” he said. “E-mail is as private as a postcard.”
Further, he said most of an organization’s security risk comes from within. Employees are responsible for 70 percent of unauthorized access to information systems, he said according to a study by Gartner, an IT research and advisory firm.
With a staff of 10, Paul might designate one employee to manage an in-house e-mail system — to be in charge of spam filtering, archiving, the e-mail server and domain security. A vendor might have teams of people who do nothing but spam filtering, he said. “I don’t have the budget to build that sort of expertise in-house.”
In addition to using hosted applications, Shark said some governments are considering storing more of their data offsite with private vendors. “That’s the piece that’s gaining more interest and popularity,” he said.
But there are concerns about whether the data would be as well protected as if they managed it themselves. Just recently, the state of Virginia’s centralized computers, managed in a public-private partnership, failed for several days, affecting motor vehicle license renewals, tax returns and payments.
When centralized data systems fail, it can cause huge problems for client agencies whose applications depend on that data, Shark said. “No system is perfect, but I think you have to really insure that these applications have absolute redundancy.”
While tough times may be leading counties to consider the cloud, Paul says never outsource just to save money. “It’s balancing your IT portfolio. Any money that I spend in technology needs to be bringing back more than we’re putting in.”
Paul and Larimer County’s Paratore moved to the cloud because their existing systems needed replacing. In addition, Paratore found Google’s applications fit the county’s growing emphasis on collaboration. Their product was in line with the county’s desire to do more team work, allow documents to be shared and worked on collaboratively, and reduce transportation costs between campuses with the video conferencing technology.
Shark says if a county has recently invested in a new data center, moving to the cloud doesn’t make sense, because of the need to amortize that investment.
So far, the cost-benefit math appears to favor the counties’ cloud migrations. Paul says it’s freed up staff resources. “I’ve got the ability now to get them out that ‘fireman mode’ into developing some skill sets that we can use to build up in other areas,” he said. “That’s where I’m putting the savings. It’s allowing us to leverage what we’ve got a lot more effectively.”
Paratore said since switching to cloud apps in July, he’s surveyed 1,850 employees about their user experience with the new system. Of the 230 who responded, 70 percent “were positive.”
For counties considering the cloud, Shark advises there’s no single formula for cloud computing. “The sky is full of many different kinds of clouds …and there could be some storm clouds,” he said. “You just have to understand and weigh the risks in light of your current investment and what you’re trying to accomplish.”