Cloud Computing at the U.S. Department of Agriculture

Key Takeaways

• USDA’s cloud spending hit its highest-level ever in FY 2020.
• Three-year spending on SaaS is more than double spending on IaaS. Spending on PaaS remains far behind the other service delivery types.
• Planned investments focus largely on legacy system modernization efforts.

After several years of growth, investment in cloud at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has reached a new level of maturity. Most components now use cloud services provided by the Digital Infrastructure Services Center (DISC) as part of an IT shared services model. A few components, however, are leaning on cloud as the centerpiece of ongoing modernization efforts. Today’s post takes a look at cloud investment at the USDA over the last few years and provides insight into where funding for cloud-related work is going.

Cloud Spending and Budget

The USDA’s spending on cloud continued grew solidly in Fiscal Year 2020, up 21.6% as a whole.

Spending on Infrastructure-as-a-Service grew to $31M in FY 2020 while Software-as-a-Service spending hit $66M. Platform-as-a-Service spending lags at $7M in FY 2020. The bulk of USDA’s cloud spending is centered in the Office of the Chief Information Officer, which spent $81M in FY 2020.

Planned Projects

Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS)

Requesting $2.5M in FY 2022 to integrate the Public Health Information System with an enterprise data warehouse in the cloud, the FSIS also wants to invest an additional $2.5M in completing the rationalization of its application portfolio. Following rationalization some capabilities will migrate to the cloud. The funding will also be used to develop and implement a fully operational data warehouse which is tightly integrated with PHIS in the cloud environment to provide strategic and analytical data for business decision-making.

Food and Nutrition Service (FNS)

The FNS requested $5M to fund a Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Innovation Team for Application System Modernization and Cloud Hosting in FY 2022. Planned activities include awarding contracts to upgrade SharePoint 2016 to SharePoint Office365 and to implement ServiceNow SaaS capabilities. FNS also intends to migrate its existing food ordering system to commercial cloud hosting and make necessary upgrades to system software.

Working Capital Fund

The USDA Print Services Tracking System (PSTS) used to track spending, production, and shipping of USDA publications and print products is beyond its service life, in an unstable operating environment, and increasingly at risk for catastrophic failure. Requesting $110K in FY 2022 to modernize the system, the OCIO will convert the PSTS into a new Printing Operations Tracking System (POTS) based on the ServiceNow platform. The initial modernization phase will re-develop the existing system in ServiceNow to align the inputs and outputs, allowing the rapid migration out of the current unstable environment. A series of development sprints will then add desired customizations.