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.

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Our 2011 InformationWeek Analytics State of Cloud Computing Survey shows a 67 percent increase in the number of companies using cloud services, up from 18 percent in February 2009 and 30 percent in October 2010. IT now has a choice: Grab ownership of what's poised to be a core part of the enterprise technology toolset, or shortchange key functions and set ourselves up for disaster.

This shouldn't be a hard call, yet over and over we see CIOs underfund or ignore six major areas: integration, security, connectivity, monitoring, continuity planning and long-term staffing. Only 29 percent of companies using or planning to use the cloud have evaluated its impact on their architectures. Just 20 percent implement monitoring of applications and throughput; 40 percent don't have any monitoring in place. Talk about blind trust.

There's a misperception that it's smaller companies driving the cloud usage upswing. But don't write off management shortfalls as an SMB problem; we saw almost the same rates of use and planned use regardless of company size, once we delved into the data. There are now viable cloud options for almost every layer of the technology stack--from raw computing, storage, databases and utilities to e-mail to the spectrum of enterprise applications, all with a "point, click, go" functionality that has maverick business units everywhere rejoicing. Ignore management at your peril. source