Margie Graves: Final Cloud Smart policy to come in ‘short order’
The White House’s finalized Cloud Smart policy document is coming “in short order,” says Margie Graves, deputy Federal CIO at the Office of Management and Budget.
“And I mean very short order,” she said Thursday at Cloud Smart Talks presented by Nutanix and produced by FedScoop.
A draft of the policy document was first released at the end of September 2018. It represents the new administration’s update to the Obama-era “Cloud First” policy, which was introduced in 2010. Cloud Smart, Graves reiterated on Thursday, is all about giving agencies the flexibility necessary to craft their own, individual journey based on their own, individual needs.
“We’re trying to lift the barriers, we’re trying to accelerate adoption, we’re trying to take some of our own policies that have been in place for multiple years and change those so that we can actually move forward,” she said.
“A lot of the things that were blocking the paths were actually things that had been created by OMB,” she added. “And they might have been right at the time, but the time has changed and technology has changed around us and time marches on.”
The idea with Cloud Smart and its built-in flexibility, she said, is that “you will never quite be stuck again.”
A key component of Cloud Smart is that it empowers agencies to decide which applications are well-suited to the cloud and which ones need to stay in their current environments. This week, the Federal CIO Council and the government’s Cloud & Infrastructure Community of Practice released a guide for agencies: The Application Rationalization Playbook is a six-step guide to “structured” IT portfolio management.
During Cloud Smart’s draft feedback period, various stakeholders asked for more clarity on managing data in a hybrid and multi-cloud environment under the new policy. The extent to which the final version addresses this remains to be seen.
