OPM is on Cloud (Computing) Nine
February 17th, 2010 by Larissa Fair, Online Marketing Manager
With the snow that hit the DC area last week, agencies that had already implemented telework policies got to experience firsthand the benefits of their efforts. But for those federal workers not lucky enough to have the ability to telework, those employees were anxious to check the operating status of the federal government.
Unfortunately, the millions of necessary (and the merely interested) folks who continuously hit the OPM site to check operating status caused the site to go down. Fortunately, cloud computing came to the rescue.
OPM Director John Berry spoke to Federal News Radio this past week about his experience implementing a cloud computing technology solution to manage the huge influx of traffic.
In one hour they had 1.8 million hits, and the site was down on Sunday night (February 7th). Talk about a scalability and availability issue. Let’s also consider that if OPM was using Twitter, Facebook, or other services hosted elsewhere, they would have still been able to communicate with employees and media on the operating status. Even a simple RSS feed or mobile text alert system would have been helpful in this case.
Instead, a solution that is of particular interest to TimYoungDC was used to combat the down website. Using cloud computing, OPM got together with the CIO at GSA to come up with a solution to share the load with other computer networks, and since then, the website has been up.
The silver lining in this cloud? They forged this solution together while working remotely.
If that wasn’t a case for teleworking and cloud computing, I don’t know what is.
Although Berry consistently cites cloud computing as the reason for keeping his sanity last week, I wonder if the solution was created by implementing a private cloud, public cloud, or hybrid solution? Anyone with more information, please let us know!
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