Cloud computing thunders into the government

When David McClure, a General Services Administration official, testified in front of a Senate subcommittee hearing that cloud computing will save the GSA nearly $2 billion every year, it became clear that the cloud has settled into the White House.
         
Indeed, the cloud craze is charging fast into government agencies. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra's office, in fact, has already identified 100 data centers it believes can be replaced by private clouds in the short-term and near 800 by 2015.
         
Aside from the benefits – agility, cost savings, resource reallocation for other projects – the cloud model represents an opportunity to transform the way IT supports key processes and operations.
Government organizations including the Department of Agriculture, Department of Health and Human Services, Military Health System of the Department of Defense and Centers for Disease Control are at various stages of deploying or planning cloud computing initiatives.
         
It's likely that the move to the cloud will grow, given that the federal government late in 2010 issued a "cloud first" policy as a part of the Office of Management and Budget's 25-point plan to reform federal information technology management. Under the policy, agency CIOs are required to identify three "must move" services and create a project plan for migrating each of them to cloud solutions and retiring the associated legacy systems. Of the three, the policy states, at least one of the services must fully migrate to a cloud solution within one year and the remaining two within 18 months.

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