Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board Cloud Migration

1. Jim Warren, Chief Information Officer Shawn Kingsberry, Deputy Chief Information Officer Recovery Accountability and Transparency BoardCloud Migration

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3. American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009The Law � February 2009 The website shall provide materials explaining what this Act means for citizens. The materials shall be easy to understand and regularly updated. The website shall provide accountability information, including findings from audits, inspectors general, and the Government Accountability Office. The website shall provide data on relevant economic, financial, grant, and contract information in user-friendly visual presentations to enhance public awareness of the use of covered funds. The website shall provide detailed data on contracts awarded by the Federal Government that expend covered funds, including information about the competitiveness of the contracting process, information about the process that was used for the award of contracts, and for contracts over $500,000 a summary of the contract. The website shall include printable reports on covered funds obligated by month to each State and congressional district. The website shall provide a means for the public to give feedback on the performance of contracts that expend covered funds. The website shall include detailed information on Federal Government contracts and grants that expend covered funds, to include the data elements required to comply with the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (Public Law 109-282), allowing aggregate reporting on awards below $25,000 or to individuals, as prescribed by the Director of the Office of Management and Budget. The website shall provide a link to estimates of the jobs sustained or created by the Act. The website shall provide a link to information about announcements of grant competitions and solicitations for contracts to be awarded. The website shall include appropriate links to other government websites with information concerning covered funds, including Federal agency and State websites. The website shall include a plan from each Federal agency for using funds made available in this Act to the agency. The website shall provide information on Federal allocations of formula grants and awards of competitive grants using covered funds. The website shall provide information on Federal allocations of mandatory and other entitlement programs by State, county, or other appropriate geographical unit. To the extent practical, the website shall provide, organized by the location of the job opportunities involved, links to and information about how to access job opportunities, including, if possible, links to or information about local employment agencies, job banks operated by State workforce agencies, the Department of Labor's CareerOneStop website, State, local and other public agencies receiving Federal funding, and private firms contracted to perform work with Federal funding, in order to direct job seekers to job opportunities created by this Act. The website shall be enhanced and updated as necessary to carry out the purposes of this subtitle. 3

4. Recovery.gov Challenges 4 Design a website to be used by millions of citizens Build a data mart to capture, warehouse, and report on data from several federal and commercial data sets Implement a geospatial analysis and visualization application to help citizens understand the local impact of Recovery Act spending Build and deploy an Enterprise Content Management System Construct an Enterprise Search capability Procure and install a large server data center enclave, with state of the art load balancing, firewalls, switches and Storage Area Network (SAN) technologies

5. The Recovery.gov Process 5

6. Recovery.gov Redeployment 6 The aggressive schedule (Physical Infrastructure Delays) Test and Development enclaves were procured and ready on Amazon EC2 within 2 days of contract award on July 14, 2009 While the physical architecture was being procured and implemented, the virtual infrastructure on the Cloud was fully built out in parallel The Applications, Data, and Visualization teams had no delays since they were not dependent on the physical infrastructure Without Cloud computing the timelines could not have been achieved

7. The Result 7

8. Solution AlternativesCloud Feasibility Assessment 8

9. Why Cloud Computing? Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996 The Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative Promote the use of Green IT by reducing the overall energy and real estate footprint of government data centers; Reduce the cost of data center hardware, software, and operations; Increase the overall IT security posture of the government; and Shift IT investments to more efficient computing platforms and technologies 9

10. Why Cloud Computing? Cont. The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models. 10

11. Recovery.gov Technologies 11

12. Recovery.gov Successful Cloud Move 12

13. Benefits Gained by Moving to the Cloud Removal of physical hosting costs ~$750k over 3 years Reuse / redistribution of ~ $700k of hardware/software for internal RATB use No dependence on physical hosting provider: o Power o Pipe o Storage o Backup o Database Management 3 yr Continuation of Operations (COOP) contract vs. 1 yr with no additional costs First government-wide system to move to the Cloud No Contract modifications required Increased flexibility / lower lifecycle costs Faster provisioning and ability to add capability on demand Increased performance under high web demand 13

14. The Cloud � Production Solution 14 Initial contract called for an identical Continuity/Disaster Recovery site For the cost of the site, which would rarely be used, the RATB could instead build out a fully redundant, highly available, and geographically separated solution on the Cloud at a fraction of the cost Advantages Improved website response times Improved monitoring capabilities (CloudWatch, etc.) Enhanced backup and recovery capabilities Added ability to elastically grow or shrink compute capacity Enhanced information assurance posture Significantly lowered the costs of ownership Repurpose 700k worth of hardware for Fraud, Waste and Abuse mission Save hundreds of thousands on Data Center costs Significantly reduce management costs of physical environment Have an improved level of network access and fault tolerance Be able to autoscale based on demand Have a security posture consistent with that of a multi-billion dollar company Prove that government innovation can save citizen�s money

15. Unprecedented Results Millions of users access Recovery.gov One of the largest federal SharePoint sites ever created One of the largest federal ESRI sites ever created Several Accolades: 2009 Merit award: �Transforming open government from promise to practice� 2010 Gold Addy award for website design Official Honoree for the Financial Services category in The 14th Annual Webby Awards Award of Distinction during the 16th Annual Communicator Awards 2nd place Gold Screen Award from the National Association of Government Communicators 15

16. QUESTIONS?