MITRE/ATARC Cloud White Paper

Excerpt

At the collaboration symposium, participants broke into four separate collaboration sessions with each session discussing a different challenge area. Each MITRE-ATARC Collaboration Session was a focused and moderated discussion among government, industry, academic, and MITRE representatives about a cloud computing challenge area.

Four separate sessions were held, individually focusing on:

• Public, Private, Government, or Hybrid clouds?
• The Umbrella of Acquisition
• Tiered Architectures
• The Role of Cloud Computing in Emerging Technologies

Each collaboration session produced common themes. Many of the challenges identified at past summits have been addressed in part, but the same challenges still exist. For example, FedRAMP is now widely accepted as a good, established baseline for minimum cloud security implementation. While acquisition remains a key challenge, success stories are beginning to appear, and best practices and recommendations are emerging. One of these recommendations is to include exit strategies in the contracts to ensure data can be pulled from a cloud provider at the end of a period of performance. While these challenges persist, they are being mitigated by government practitioners. Other challenges and common themes came out of the collaboration sessions. The participants recognized that financial savings is becoming secondary to the performance and long-term benefits of adopting emerging technologies, including cloud computing. Cloud computing is becoming the enabler of other emerging technologies, as well. Lacking from the cloud computing domain are metrics to assess adoption effectiveness, true cost of adoption (e.g., benefits of automation), cost of delaying adoption (e.g., reduced capabilities or higher costs later in the lifecycle), and a standard unit of cost.