How to avoid a HealthCare.gov fiasco in your cloud

Last week, Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the U.S. Health and Human Services Dept. and the public face of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), announced her resignation. She had been under attack by Congress and others ever since the botched rollout of the federal Obamacare signup site, HealthCare.gov, last fall. At launch, HealthCare.gov was able to sign up only a few subscribers per hour. These days, the site is pretty much fixed, and the total signups ultimately exceeded the government's original prediction of 7 million (8 million actually signed up). But the debacle's stain continues to dog HealthCare.gov in particular -- security concerns persist, for example -- and Obamacare in general. How could those failures have been avoided, and what can the feds and other large organizations learn about deploying other such massive cloud services? A panel discussion recently at Penn State's Center for Enterprise Architecture tried to answer those questions.