Monday, February 21, 2011

US President Turns to the Cloud to Cut IT Costs

The Obama administration announced it will increase its focus on cloud computing as a means to keep IT costs under control.
During his federal budget proposal, Obama made it clear that he sees the cloud as an excellent way of lowering IT costs in 2012.
Although Obama’s $79.5 billion IT budget is a considerably large amount for spending, it is expected the administration will be able to keep spending flat, due to the cost savings it’s expecting to make through the move to cloud computing and data center consolidation.
According to numerous reports, it is estimated that the move by the federal government could reduce IT spending by around $3 billion.
Federal CIO Vivek Kundra recently announced the government “will be able to reduce our data center infrastructure expenditure by approximately 30 percent. The adoption of cloud computing will play a pivotal role in helping the government close the productivity gap between the public and private sectors.”
Kundra recently released the governments cloud technologies strategy. According to Kundra, the new strategy “will revolve around commercial cloud technologies where feasible, launching private government clouds, and utilizing regional clouds with state and local governments where appropriate.”
Kundra’s report estimates that if the government reallocates $20 billion of its IT budget to cloud technologies, it could reduce data center infrastructure costs by more than 30 percent.