Will Cloud-First Carry On Without Kundra?

When Farzad Mostashari, MD, took the helm at ONC, he thanked his predecessor David Blumenthal, MD, for a parting gift: the draft ONC Federal Health IT Strategic Plan.

Whether Federal CIO Vivek Kundra’s yet-to-be-named successor will say the same of Kundra's 25-point plan when Kundra heads north to the same Harvard campus to which Blumenthal has returned, well, that remains to be seen.

A feature of that plan is the Cloud-First Policy. At its core, Cloud-First is about consolidating physical datacenters – and reaping the cost-savings, IT and otherwise, that placing those resources into the cloud could realize. But the plan could be pie in the sky if the agencies charged with metamorphosing data centers into clouds lack the understanding and incentive to do so.