photo credit: dionhinchcliffe

US Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra, recently released a paper describing the federal government’s move to cloud computing titled “Federal Cloud Computing Strategy.” The opening line of the executive summary pretty well lays out all the problems with the government’s current Information Technology (IT) environment and recognizes that this causes lots of problems for the public. One example given later in the report is that within the Department of Agriculture there are 21 different mailing systems which is obviously very inefficient and needlessly expensive. Cloud computing could potentially play a major part in rectifying these problems.

Currently the US spends $80 billion on IT software and hardware. The paper states that potentially 1/4  or $20 billion of that could be shifted to cloud computing solutions. That’s a lot of money and a lot of IT capability! Read the rest of this entry »