US govt cuts costs with cloud

The US government is looking to cloud computing as a way to lower costs in government operations, says VOANews.

Vivek Kundra, Federal CIO at the White House, says government is just beginning its efforts to make a shift to cloud computing which can help cut costs, improve efficiency, promote innovation and shine a light into the performance of government.

The US government currently spends nearly $76 billion a year on information technology, with $20 billion of that spent on hardware, software and file servers. Darrel West, director of governance at Brookings, says there can be savings of up to 50% by migrating to cloud computing.

With a number of cloud computing initiatives already under way across the US Defense Department, the military has established a something of a beachhead in the dawning days of scalable, on-demand computing over the Internet, states Defense Systems.

Now, as the army starts to move forward with the first of its consolidated enterprise services, that beachhead is about to expand rapidly. Last month the army released a draft request for proposals for its new consolidated enterprise e-mail service.

The Enterprise Messaging and Collaboration Services programme is intended to eventually provide all soldiers with a single e-mail address that follows them throughout their military career, consolidating e-mail across all of the army's commands under a single umbrella.

Universities are increasingly outsourcing computer services infrastructure to cloud services to reduce costs, reports Times Higher Education.

Rob Bristow, programme manager at the Joint Information Systems Committee, says the growing trend of outsourcing was primarily financially motivated, adding: "It's clear that the key driver forcing the use of cloud services is cost. Anything that can reduce the back-office cost is going to be looked at.”

Both Google and Microsoft offer student e-mail systems for free. Mark Stubbs, head of learning and research technologies at Manchester Metropolitan University, says his institution saved costs by opting not to replace its in-house e-mail in favour of outsourcing to the Microsoft-hosted Live@edu service.