Agriculture to shift all workers to the cloud by year's end

Aiming to have its entire workforce using computer services in the cloud by the end of the year, the Agriculture Department is moving inboxes and other business applications for about 10,000 employees each month from in-house systems to the Web, Chief Information Officer Chris Smith said on Friday.

Dollars freed up through cloud computing -- which eliminates the need to maintain costly data centers -- will go toward other technology upgrades such as financial system modernizations and tablet computers, Smith added.

Microsoft Corp., the contractor delivering Agriculture's information technology services over the Internet, is operating a couple hundred test mailboxes for its 120,000-person workforce. "We are basically in a burn-in stage," Smith said in an interview with Nextgov. "It's operational. It's ready . . . [but] you crawl in before you walk."

Agriculture is one of a handful of agencies that have begun outsourcing IT equipment and services as part of an initiative to shut down at least 800 of the federal government's more than 2,000 data centers by 2015. The Obama administration expects to shift $20 billion of its roughly $80 billion annual IT purse to the cloud -- a move that has presented new contract opportunities for the likes of Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Salesforce.

But security is an issue when allowing third parties to handle government data off-site, especially e-mail.

"E-mail is a major vector for cybersecurity vulnerability threats that are out there," Smith said. "We have a pretty robust set of standards" for security.

While Microsoft's cloud applications are not yet certified under the 2002 Federal Information Management Security Act, the company has interim FISMA authority to provide software services. Microsoft expects to gain final approval from an independent certification agent in the next several weeks, company officials said. Google was the first vendor to obtain FISMA certification for cloud apps.

The cloud project is accelerating work already under way to centralize IT services for the department's 7,000 locations nationwide, Smith said. Many employees dispersed across the country, such as soil scientists and food safety inspectors, increasingly rely on smart phones and portable computers to do their jobs.

"We are very, very focused on mobile technologies," Smith said. "We think there is great opportunity to best serve the citizen." Agriculture equips field personnel with a variety of high-tech devices, including iPhones and a couple of hundred iPads.