- The panel discussed how governments can gain economic benefits from interoperability and standardization between public cloud providers. While the private sector has widely adopted cloud computing, public sector adoption is more complicated with some agencies lagging behind. - Large government contracts represent significant opportunities for major cloud providers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to expand their government and federal business. However, they need to ensure adequate security, interoperability and customization to meet public sector needs. - For governments, a lack of standardization makes it harder to show taxpayers they are getting the best value. While open source platforms can help enable interoperability, APIs will be more important for interoperability between cloud providers. - Both Europe

1. How Governments Gain Economic Benefits from Inter-
Public-Cloud Interoperability and Standardization
Transcript of a panel discussion with members of The Open Group on the latest developments in
eGovernment and cloud adoption.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Sponsor: The Open
Group
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect Thought Leadership Panel
Discussion coming to you in conjunction with The Open Group Paris Event and Member
Meeting October 24 through 27, 2016 in France.
Given that the Paris event has a focus on the latest developments in
eGovernment, our panel will now explore how public-sector organizations can
gain economic benefits from cloud interoperability and standardization.
As government agencies move to the public cloud computing model, the use of
more than one public-cloud provider can offer economic benefits by a
competition and choice. But are the public clouds standardized efficiently for true
interoperability and can the large government contracts in the offing for cloud providers have an
impact on the level of maturity around standardization?
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I'll be your host and moderator
as we examine how to best procure multiple cloud services as eGovernment services at low risk
and high reward.
With that, please join me now in welcoming our panel. We're here with Dr. Chris Harding,
Director for Interoperability at The Open Group. Welcome, Chris.
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Dr. Chris Harding: Thank you, Dana. It's great to be in this podcast.
Gardner: We're here also with Dave Linthicum, Senior Vice President at Cloud Technology
Partners. Welcome, Dave.
David Linthicum: Thank you very much, Dana.
Gardner: And lastly, we're here with Andras Szakal, Vice President and Chief Technology
Officer at IBM U.S. Federal. Welcome, Andras.
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Gardner

2. Andras Szakal: Thank you for having me.
Gardner: Andras, let's start with you. I've spoken to some people in the lead-up to this
discussion today about the level of government-sector adoption of cloud services, especially
public cloud. They tell me that it’s lagging the private sector. Is that what you're encountering,
that the public sector is lagging the private sector or is it more complicated than that?
Szakal: It's a bit more complicated than that. The public sector born-on-the-cloud adoption is
probably much greater than the public sector and it differentiates. So the industry at large, from a
born-on-the-cloud point of view is very much ahead of the public-sector government
implementation of born-on-the-cloud applications.
What really drove that was innovations like the Internet of Things (IoT), gaming
systems, and platforms, whereas the government environment really was more
about taking existing government citizens to government shared services and so
on and so forth and putting them into the cloud environment.
When you're talking about public cloud, you have to be very specific about the
public sector and government, because most governments have their own industry
instance of their cloud. In the federal government space, they're acutely aware of
the FedRAMP certified public-cloud environments. That can go from moderate risk, where you
can have access to the yummy goodness of the entire cloud industry, but then, to FedRAMP
High, which would isolate these clouds into their own environments in order to increase the level
of protection and lower the risk to the government.
So, the cloud service provider (CSP) created instances of these commercial clouds fit-for-purpose
for the federal government. In that case, if we're talking about enterprise applications shifting to
the cloud, we're seeing the public sector government side, at the national level, move very
rapidly, compared to some of the commercial enterprises who are more leery about what the
implications of that movement may be over a period of time. There isn't anybody that's
mandating that they do that by law, whereas that is the case on the government side.
Attracting contracts
Gardner: Dave, it seems that if I were a public-cloud provider, I couldn't think of a better
customer, a better account in terms of size and longevity, than some major government agencies.
What are we seeing from the cloud providers in trying to attract the government contracts and
perhaps provide the level of interoperability and standardization that they require?
Linthicum: The big three -- Amazon, Google. and Microsoft -- are really making an effort to get
into that market. They all have federal sides to their house. People are selling into that space right
now, and I think that they're seeing some progress. The FAA and certainly the DoD have been
moving in that direction.
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Szakal

3. However, they do realize that they have to build kind of a net new infrastructure, a net new way
of doing procurements to get into that space. In the case where the US is building the world’s
biggest private cloud at the CIA, they've had to change their technology around the
needs of the government.
They see it as really the "Fortune 1." They see it as the largest opportunity that’s
there, and they're willing to make huge investments in the billions of dollars to
capture that market when it arrives.
Gardner: Over to Dr. Chris Harding at The Open Group. It seems to me that we
might be facing a situation where we have cloud providers offering a set of services
to large government organizations, but perhaps a different set to the private sector. From an
interoperability and standardization perspective, that doesn’t make too much sense to me.
What’s your perspective on how public-cloud services and standardization are shaping up?
Where did you expect things to be at this point?
Harding: Dana, the government has an additional dimension to that of the private sector when it
comes to procurement in terms of the need to be transparent and to be spending the money that’s
entrusted to them by the public in a wise manner. One of the issues they have with
a lack of standardization is that it makes it more difficult for them to show that
they're visibly getting the best deals from the taxpayers when they come to procure
cloud services.
In fact, The Open Group produced a guide to cloud computing for business a
couple of years ago. One of the things that we argued in that was that, when
procuring cloud services, the enterprise should model the use that it intends to
make of the cloud services and therefore be able to understand the costs that they
were likely to incur. This is perhaps more important for government, even more than it is for
private enterprises. And you're right, the lack of standardization makes it more difficult for them
to do this.
Gardner: Chris, do you think that interoperability is of a higher order of demand in public-
sector cloud acquisition than in the private sector, or should there be any differentiation?
Need for interoperability
Harding: Both really have the need for interoperability. The public sector perhaps has a greater
need, simply because it’s bigger than a small enterprise and it’s therefore more likely to want to
use more cloud services in combination.
Gardner: Back to Andras. We've certainly seen a lot of open-source platforms emerge in private
cloud as well as hybrid cloud. Is that a driving force yet in the way that the public sector is
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Linthicum
Harding

4. looking at public-cloud services acquisition? Is open source a guide to what we should expect in
terms of interoperability and standardization in public-cloud services for eGovernment?
Szakal: Open source, from an application implementation point of view, is one of the questions
you're asking, but are you also suggesting that somehow these cloud platforms will be
reconsidered or implemented via open source? There's truth to both of those
statements.
IBM is the number two cloud provider in the federal government
space, if you look at hybrid and the commercial cloud for which we provide three
major cloud environments. All of those cloud implementations are based on open source --
OpenStack and Cloud Foundry are key pieces of this -- as well as the entire DevOps lifecycle.
So, open source is important, but if you think of open source as a way to ensure interoperability,
kind of what we call in The Open Group environment "Executable Standards," it is a way to
ensure interoperability.
That’s more important at the cloud-stack level than it is between cloud providers, because
between cloud providers you're really going to be talking about API-driven interoperability, and
we have that down pretty well.
So, the economy of APIs and the creation of this composite services are going to be very, very
important elements. If they're closed and not open to following the normal RESTful approaches
defined by the W3C and other industry consortia, then it’s going to be difficult to create these
composite clouds.
Gardner: Dave Linthicum, we saw that OpenStack had its origins in a government agency,
NASA. In that case, clearly a government organization, at least in the United States, was driving
the desire for interoperability and standardization, a common platform approach. Has that been
successful? Is that not the case anymore, and why wouldn’t the government continue to try to
take that approach of a common, open-source platform for cloud interoperability?
Linthicum: OpenStack has had some fair success, but I wouldn’t call it excellent success. One
of the issues is that the government left it dangling out there, and while using some aspects of it,
I really expected them to make some more adoption around that open standard, for lots of
reasons.
So, they have to hack the operating systems and meet very specific needs around security,
governance, compliance, and things like that. They have special use cases, such as the DoD,
weapons control systems in real time, and some IoT stuff that the government would like to
move into. So, that’s out there as an opportunity.
In other words, the ability to work with some of the distros out there, and there are dozens of
them, and get into a special government version of that operating system, which is supported
openly by the government integrators and providers, is something they really should take
advantage of. It hasn’t happened so far and it’s a bit disappointing.
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5. Insight into Europe
Gardner: Do any of you have any insight into Europe and some of the government agencies
there? They haven’t been shy in the past about mandating certain practices when it comes to
public contracts for acquisition of IT services. I think cloud should follow the same path. Is there
a big difference in what’s going on in Europe and in North America?
Szakal: I just got off the phone a few minutes ago with my counterpart in the UK. The nice thing
about the way the UK government is approaching cloud computing is that they're trying to do so
by taking the handcuffs off the vendors and making sure that they are standards based. They're
meeting a certain quality of services for them, but they're not mandating through policy and by
law the structure of their cloud. So, it allows for us, at least within IBM, to take advantage of this
incredible industry ecosystem you have on the commercial side, without having to consider that
you might have to lift and shift all of this very expensive infrastructure over to these industry
clouds.
The EU is, in similar ways, following a similar practice. Obviously, data sovereignty is really an
important element for most governments. So, you see a lot of focus on data sovereignty and data
portability, more so than we do around strict requirements in following a particular set of security
controls or standards that would lock you in and make it more difficult for you to evolve over a
period of time.
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Gardner: Chris Harding, to Andras’ point about data interoperability, do you see that as a point
on the arrow that perhaps other cloud interoperability standards would follow? Is that something
that you're focused on more specifically than more general cloud infrastructure services?
Harding: Cloud is a huge spectrum, from the infrastructure services at the bottom,up to the
business services, the application services, to software as a service (SaaS), and data
interoperability sits on top of that stack.
I'm not sure that we're ready to get real data interoperability yet, but the work that's being done
on trying to establish common frameworks for understanding data, for interpreting data, is very
important as a basis for gaining interoperability at that level in the future.
We also need to bear in mind that the nature of data is changing. It’s no longer a case that all data
comes from a SQL database. There are all sorts of ways in which data is represented, including
human forms, such as text and speech, and interpreting those is becoming more possible and
more important.
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6. This is the exciting area, where you see the most interesting work on interoperability.
Gardner: Dave Linthicum, one of the things that some of us who have been proponents of cloud
for a number of years now have looked to is the opportunity to get something that couldn’t have
been done before, a whole greater than the sum of the parts.
It seems to me that if you have a common cloud fabric and the sufficient amount of
interoperability for data and/or applications and infrastructure services and that cuts across both
the public and the private sector, then this difficulty we've had with health insurance, payer and
provider, interoperability and communication, sharing of government services, and data with the
private sector, many of the things that have been probably blamed on bureaucracy and technical
backwardness in some ways could be solved if there was a common public cloud approach
adopted by the major public cloud providers. It seems to me a very significant benefit could be
drawn when the public and private sector have a commonality that having your own data centers
of the past just couldn't provide.
Am I chewing on too much pie in the sky here, Dave, or is there actually something to be said
about the cloud model, not just between government to government agencies, but the public and
private sectors?
Getting more savvy
Linthicum: The public-cloud providers out there, the big ones, are getting more savvy about
providing interoperability, because they realized that it’s going to be multi-cloud. It’s going to be
different private and public cloud instances, different kinds of technologies, that are there, and
you have to work and play well with a number of different technologies.
However, to be a little bit more skeptical, over the years, I've found out that they're in it for their
own selfish interests, and they should be, because they're corporations. They're going to basically
try to play up their technology to get into a market and hold on to the market, and by doing that,
they typically operate against interoperability. They want to make it as difficult as possible to
integrate with the competitors and leverage their competitors’ services.
So, we have that kind of dynamic going on, and it’s incredibly frustrating, because we can
certainly stand up, have the discussion, and reveal the concepts. You just did a really good job in
revealing that this has been Nirvana, and we should start moving in this direction. You will
typically get lots of head-nodding from the public-cloud providers and the private-cloud
providers but actions speak louder than words, and thus far, it’s been very counterproductive.
Interoperability is occurring but it’s in dribs and drabs and nothing holistic.
Gardner: Chris, it seems as if the earlier you try to instill interoperability and standardization
both in technical terms, as well as methodological, that you're able to carry that into the future
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7. where we don't repave cow paths, but we have highly non-interoperable data centers replaced by
them being in the cloud, rather than in some building that you control.
What do you think is going to be part of the discussion at The Open Group Paris Event, October
24, around some of these concepts of eGovernment? Shouldn’t they be talking about trying to
make interoperability something that's in place from the start, rather than something that has to
be imposed later in the process?
Harding: Certainly this will be an important topic at the forthcoming Paris event. My personal
view is that the question of when you should standardize something to gain interoperability is a
very difficult balancing act. If you do it too late, then you just get a mess of things that don’t
interoperate, but equally, if you try to introduce standards before the market is ready for them,
you generally end up with something that doesn’t work, and you get a mess for a different
reason.
Part of the value of industry events, such as The Open Group events, is for people in different
roles in different organizations to be able to discuss with each other and get a feel for the state of
maturity and the directions in which it's possible to create a standard that will stick. We're seeing
a standard paradigm, the API paradigm, that was mentioned earlier. We need to start building
more specific standards on top of those, and certainly in Paris and at future Open Group events,
those are the things we'll be discussing.
Gardner: Andras, you wear a couple of different hats. One is the Chief Technology Officer at
IBM US Federal, but you're also very much involved with The Open Group. I think you're on the
Board of Directors. How do you see this progression of what The Open Group has been able to
do in other spheres around standardization and both methodological, such as an enterprise
architecture framework, TOGAF®, an Open Group standard,, as well as the implementation
enforcement of standards? Is what The Open Group has done in the past something you expect to
be applicable to these cloud issues?
Szakal: IBM has a unique history, being one of the only companies in the technology arena. It’s
over a 100-years-old and has been able to retain great value to its customers over that long period
of time, and we shifted from a fairly closed computing environment to this idea of open
interoperability and freedom of choice.
That's our approach for our cloud environment as well. What drives us in this direction is
because our customers require it from IBM, and we're a common infrastructure and a glue that
binds together many of our enterprise and the largest financial banking and healthcare institutions
in the world to ensure that they can interoperate with other vendors.
As such, we were one of the founders of The Open Group, which has been at the forefront of
helping facilitate this discussion about open interoperability. I'm totally with Chris as to when
you would approach that. As I said before, my concern is that you interoperate at the service
level in the economy of APIs. That would suggest that there are some other elements for that, not
just the API itself, but the ability to effectively manage credentials, security, or some other
common services, like being able to manage object stores to the place that you would like to be
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8. able to store your information, so that data sovereignty isn’t an issue. These are all the things that
will occur over a period of time.
Early days
It’s early, heady days in the cloud world, and we're going to see all of that goodness come to
pass here as we go forward. In reality, we talk about cloud it as if it’s a thing. It’s true value isn't
so much in the technology, but in creating these new disruptive business capabilities and
business models. Openness of the cloud doesn’t facilitate that creation of those new business
models.
That’s where we need to focus. Are we able to actually drive these new collaborative models
with our cloud capabilities? You're going to be interoperating with many CSPs not just two,
three, or four, especially as you see different factors grow into the cloud. It won’t matter where
they operate their cloud services from; it will matter how they actually interoperate at that API
level.
Gardner: It certainly seems to me that the interoperability is the killer application of the cloud.
It can really foster greater inter-department collaboration and synergy, government to
government, state to federal, across the EU, for example as well, and then also to the private
sector, where you have healthcare concerns and you've got monetary and banking and finance
concerns all very deeply entrenched in both public and private sectors. So, we hope that that’s
where the openness leads to.
Chris, before we wrap up, it seems to me that there's a precedent that has been set successfully
with The Open Group, when it comes to security. We've been able to do some pretty good work
over the past several years with cloud security using the adoption of standards around encryption
or tokenization, for example. Doesn’t that sort of give us a path to greater interoperability at
other levels of cloud services? Is security a harbinger of things to come?
Harding: Security certainly is a key aspect that needs to be incorporated in the standards where
we build on the API paradigm. But, some people talk about move to digital transformation, the
digital enterprise. So, cloud and other things like IoT, big-data analysis, and so on are all coming
together, and a key underpinning requirement for that is platform integration. That's where the
Open Platform 3.0™ Forum of The Open Group is centering on the possibilities for platform
interoperability to enable digital platform integration. Security is a key aspect of that, but there
are other aspects too.
Gardner: I am afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been discussing the latest
developments in eGovernment and cloud adoption with a panel of experts. Our focus on these
issues comes in conjunction with The Open Group Paris Event and Member Meeting, October
24-27, 2016 in Paris, France, and there is still time to register.
8

9. So please check out The Open Group website at www.opengroup.org for more information on
that event and many others coming in the future.
With that, I'd like to thank our guests. We’ve been here with a panel that consists of Dr. Chris
Harding, Director for Interoperability at The Open Group. Thank you so much, Chris.
Harding: Thank you, Dana.
Gardner: We've also been here with David Linthicum, Senior Vice President at Cloud
Technology Partners. Thanks, Dave, for your contribution.
Linthicum: It’s always a pleasure, Dana.
Gardner: And we've been here with Andras Szakal, Vice President and Chief Technology
Officer at IBM US Federal. Thank you so much, Andras.
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Szakal: My pleasure. Thank you.
Gardner: And a big thank you as well to The Open Group for sponsoring this discussion, and
lastly, thank you to our audience for joining us on this BriefingsDirect panel discussion.
This is Dana Gardner; Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator. Thanks
again for listening, and do come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Sponsor: The Open
Group
Transcript of a panel discussion with members of The Open Group on the latest developments in
eGovernment and cloud adoption. Copyright The Open Group and Interarbor Solutions, LLC,
2005-2016. All rights reserved.
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