Attached below is a GAO report to the Senate Homeland Security Committee which found that “selected federal agencies have made progress implementing the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) “Cloud First” policy.” GAO also noted that while “each of the seven agencies submitted plans to OMB for implementing the cloud solutions, all but one plan were missing key required elements. For example, 7 of the 20 plans did not include estimated costs and none of the plans for services that were to migrate existing functionality to a cloud-based service included plans for retiring or repurposing the associated legacy systems.”
In the report, “GAO identified seven common challenges associated with the implementation of OMB’s ‘Cloud First’ policy.”
- Meeting Federal Security Requirements
- Obtaining guidance
- Acquiring knowledge and expertise
- Certifying and accrediting vendors
- Ensuring data portability and interoperability
- Overcoming cultural barriers
- Procuring services on a consumption (on-demand) basis
GAO made the following recommendations:
To help ensure the success of agencies’ implementation of cloud-based solutions, we are recommending that the Secretaries of Agriculture, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, State, and the Treasury; and the Administrators of the General Services Administration and Small Business Administration direct their respective CIOs to take the following two actions:
• establish estimated costs, performance goals, and plans to retire associated legacy systems for each cloud-based service discussed in this report, as applicable; and
• develop, at a minimum, estimated costs, milestones, performance goals, and plans for retiring legacy systems, as applicable, for planned additional cloud-based services.
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