Cloud computing, virtualization rank as leading initiatives for government IT workers.
The U.S. government has laid out broad plans for the implementation of cloud computing in the federal government infrastructure — a step reflecting a fundamental re-examination of investments in technology infrastructure. A recent study from Market Research Media forecasts that federal government spending on cloud computing is entering an explosive growth phase — at about 40 percent compound annual growth rate over the next five years, with expenditures passing $7 billion by 2015.
Federal government CIO Vivek Kundra actively supports cloud computing and its underlying virtualization technology as a means for saving money, improving data sharing and promoting collaboration among federal, state and local governments. Kundra issued a memo to all federal agency CIOs in February instructing them to come up with plans to consolidate their data centers this year and incorporate those plans into fiscal 2012 budgets.
The reported number of federal data centers grew from 432 in 1998 to more than 1,100 in 2009, and Kundra’s memo notes that the growth of “redundant infrastructure” has become “costly, inefficient, unsustainable and has a significant impact on energy consumption.”
The federal government spends nearly $76 billion each year on information technology, and $20 billion of that is devoted to hardware, software and file servers. The Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy organization, says the government stands to save billions of dollars by accessing software, services and data storage through remote file servers in the cloud.
“As the world’s largest consumer of information technology and as stewards of taxpayer dollars, the federal government has a duty to be a leader in pioneering the use of new technologies that are more efficient and economical,” Kundra wrote in a recent blog post. “By using cloud services, the federal government will gain access to powerful technology resources faster and at lower costs. This frees us to focus on mission-critical tasks instead of purchasing, configuring and maintaining redundant infrastructure.”
Cloud computing and virtualization management ranked as the leading initiatives for federal IT workers surveyed in May at the 2010 FOSE conference in Washington D.C. FOSE is the largest federal government IT trade show in the U.S.
Fifty-eight percent of government network engineers, systems administrators and IT managers surveyed listed cloud computing as important, up from 41 percent in 2009. Actual adoption remains fairly low (7 percent) but planned cloud initiatives jumped from just 12 percent in 2009 to 30 percent this year. The numbers were up across the board on virtualization management, with 86 percent stating it was important or very important, 32 percent with tools in place and another 38 percent planning implementations this year.
“The shift to cloud computing is in process, and as the largest IT buyer in the world, the federal government acts as a barometer for just how massive it will be and how quickly the shift will occur,” said David Link, CEO of ScienceLogic, which conducted the survey. “The cloud has so many advantages for the federal government, that it makes sense for agencies to utilize the technology to develop more agile, scalable and flexible IT infrastructure to manage mission-critical operations.”
