GiGi Schumm,
Vice President and General Manager, Public Sector, Symantec Corp.

There are three: information risk, information growth, and information trust.

The risk environment has changed so much in the past few years, with nation states, organized crime and malicious attackers targeting organizations in unprecedented ways in order to steal valuable information. It’s no longer about someone who just wants to disrupt your systems, or teenage hackers looking for notoriety.

Information is growing anywhere from 40 percent to 80 percent a year, according to what we are hearing. How do you deal with the costs of storing, managing and protecting that information? This is an area where we think the cloud can have a strong impact, because as you move away from a systems centric management model to the cloud you can dramatically reduce the amount of information you have to manage and protect. We’ve seen data reduction rates of around 90 percent to 95 percent with data de-duplication.

Information trust goes beyond just protecting information from malicious outsiders. It’s about whether an IT organization has the trust and confidence to not only secure information but also store, discover and retrieve it in that new cloud computing model.

Of the three, information growth is the problem closest to being adopted for cloud solutions.

Tom Ruff,
Vice President, Public Sector, Akamai Technologies, Inc.

The government has been facing a variety of business challenges, and now they are experiencing significant economic challenges as well. Every agency is faced with cuts, and we ’ll probably be seeing more. For the first time, agencies are seeing significant cuts, which will impact  their current and planned infrastructure expenditures. At the same time, there is an edict for agencies to be more transparent, and to deliver services faster and cheaper. Concurrently, they still have to support both anticipated and unanticipated workloads.

These challenges will make it difficult for agencies to accurately determine the right size of their infrastructures while still meeting security and workload demands.

Based on the right set of applications, cloud computing allows agencies to meet these challenges while at the same time reducing their overall costs.

Richard W. Johnson,
Chief Technology Officer and Vice President, Lockheed Martin Information Systems & Global Solutions

Agencies must reduce costs, and cloud computing, primarily because of virtualization technology, allows them to provide a more elastic, low cost infrastructure. But agencies also have to be more agile and deliver mission applications to the end user faster. Cloud computing enables a much faster development lifecycle than traditional methods, so they can get those capabilities into the hands of the end user faster, which is where you need them.

There’s also an opportunity for agencies to advance their missions in this. The confluence of virtualization, the ubiquitous capabilities associated with the Internet and the growing use of technology, such as handheld devices, by people in their personal lives, gives the federal government a great chance to provide better services to their constituents. There’s a new set of opportunities that didn’t exist before these technologies matured.