Cloud Services – The Future for US Government IT

The migration to cloud computing is off and running in the US Federal Government. In February, 2011, then US CIO Vivek Kundra published Federal Cloud Computing Strategy , wherein he noted that as much as $20 billion of the $80 billion in Federal Government IT spending is a potential target for migration to cloud computing solutions. Agencies were directed to evaluate their technology sourcing strategies to include consideration of cloud computing solutions. OMB expects to save $5 billion annually by 2015 by transferring approximately 25% of the governments computing to the cloud according to Joseph Marks in NextGov.

While all systems are under consideration for migration to cloud services, email is an early target for many agencies including the General Services Administration was the first agency to transition its email services to the cloud, which was completed in June 2011. Commerce is the latest agency to transition its 25,000 employees to cloud-based Google mail. HUD, Education, EPA, Interior, Justice, Labor, Social Security, and Archives (NARA) have all identified email as a target for early transition. Overall, Agencies identified a total of 78 systems to migrate within the first year of this new program.

Universities, and large and small businesses are evaluating and migrating many services to cloud infratstructure and/or systems – like Google’s GMail, Google Docs and Google Apps for Education.

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