VA to get ruthless on redundant software
Agency CIO Roger Baker said a new initiative will try to pare down the number of software packages employees use by 95 percent. The Ruthless Shutdown Project, i...
Baker is framing this effort as part money saving exercise and part natural progression that many private sector organizations have gone through.
He said VA expects its IT budget to drop by nearly $700 million in fiscal 2012, down to $3.16 billion so ensuring efficiencies in every part of the organization is important.
Part of the way VA will address the budget cuts is by increasing its use of cloud computing. Baker said the applications that have only a few users could be hosted on a cloud for a much lower cost.
“When you start thinking about closing down an application, the first thing you will ask is ‘Is there a cloud app for that? Can we provide access to some cloud app that 10 people need instead of VA running a particular application?'” he said. “I think we will start factoring that in and take our low priority applications and look for something in the cloud.”
Baker said for VA to use a cloud, the provider must meet three requirements:
- The individuals accessing the information on the cloud are authorized to see the data so access to those cloud apps will go through VA’s authentication process.
- The apps also much be secure and kept private.
- The data must be stored in a data center in the U.S.
“The real cloud is the cloud we can’t control and the one that because of that has some tremendous apps in it that our users and our customers want to use to access our information,” he said.
Baker said he also would like to see a vendor put a government approved financial management application in the cloud–something federal CIO Vivek Kundra also called for recently–and an open source version of VA’s VISTA software in an external cloud.
In addition the reducing applications across the infrastructure, Baker also is trying to make it easier for doctors, nurses and others to use commercial applications on mobile devices.
Without saying the product name, Baker said he expects to approve the use of iPhones on the VA network in the near future.
He said there will be some security controls such as employees can use only approved software and apps, and certain functions may need to be turned off. But Baker said the end goal is to let employees use the device of their choice on VA’s network to help them meet the agency’s mission the best way possible.
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