Leveraging cloud-delivered services would have helped inside the overall stability and success of the HealthCare.gov website, and doubtless still can going forward.
Glitch (noun) \ˈglich\: an unexpected and frequently minor problem; especially: a minor problem with a machine or device (consisting of a pc) Source: m-w.com
It is tough to show at the news lately without some mention of the HealthCare.gov website. There are various of folk talking who do not know lots about complex systems, occasionally punctuated with smart commentary from an industry expert. The various conversation centers on how “unbelievable” it really is that the center-piece of the Affordable Care Act doesn’t work.
In reality, it isn’t that arduous to believe. Study after study has shown that almost all of complex IT projects either fail or don’t meet expectations. Some of the explanation why these projects fail are embodied in what we’ve got heard about HealthCare.gov:
- Late changing requirements
- Poor design choices
- Inadequate project risk management
- Insufficient QA/system testing
In the age of cloud computing, you hope that these problems may be better addressed. To be clear, i’m not saying that HealthCare.gov will need to have been written as a cloud-delivered website. Although down the line that variety of rewrite may well be so as, the conventional three-tier web architecture employed in HealthCare.gov ought to be greater than flexible and scalable enough to deal with this kind of application (there were a variety of good articles written at the architecture).
[Read our complete coverage of the HealthCare.gov launch here.]
What i’m saying is that leveraging cloud-delivered services would have helped inside the overall stability and success of the web site, and possibly still can going forward. The benefit of a cloud-delivered service is it doesn’t require installation, setup, and administration onsite. In a project that’s delayed and over budget, cloud services can bring capability rapidly and probably save expense. Let me offer you some examples:
Development. You do not have to be developing for the cloud to be developing inside the cloud. Leveraging IaaS solutions as part of any development project yields a number of advantages. First, startup time is a fragment of what it takes vs. procuring, configuring, and integrating the compute and storage resources required for a massive IT project. Second, you pay only for what you employ and feature instant scalability. Finally, the facility to “clone” a complete system and spin it up quickly is a big timesaver for the team doing quality assurance. With most major vendors having federal government-approved cloud services, any such approach will be workable.
Performance. There has been an excellent interview on Bloomberg TV with Maha Ibrahim of Canaan Partners, discussing the issues with HealthCare.gov and the capability role of cloud-based web testing. She observed the corporate SOASTA (pronounced so-sta) which uses compute power from cloud IaaS providers so one can create 1,000 simulated users. With a cloud-based performance testing approach, you can actually create true high-volume stress tests and find the bugs before going live.
Security. At a contemporary House subcommittee testimony, a commenter said there have been “at the very least 16 attempts” to hack into the system. David Kennedy of Trusted SEC responded to this by saying “what this statement shows is the inability of a proper detection and prevention capability inside the website and its infrastructure,” as 16 is a very low number for such a system. Cloud-based (SaaS) systems, which offer threat detection and management for a domain, have gotten the hot standard. The good thing about a SaaS solution is that it could be deployed quickly and scale because the site scales. These systems are in no way an answer for internal security and knowledge privacy issues, but provide another layer of external protection for the web site.
I should add this disclaimer: I actually have no inside knowledge of the HealthCare.gov project, so a number of what i’m suggesting may already be in place.
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Moving email to the cloud has lowered IT costs and improved efficiency. Discover what federal agencies can learn from early adopters. Also inside the The good Email Migration issue of InformationWeek Government: Lessons from a successful government data site. (Free registration required.)
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