Thursday, October 25, 2012

Followup: cloud computing in US federal agencies

InformationWeek reports,

More government agencies are plugging into the cloud, finding savings and exploring new uses, according to InformationWeek's survey of federal IT professionals. View this complementary report to learn why the question isn’t so much whether there's been progress since the Office of Management and Budget introduced the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy in February 2011, but how much progress there has been
.

As I reported in Government CIO Magazine, the cloud is an integral part of the government's streamlining efforts. But can agencies expect to save millions, as the IW article posits?
GSA's inspector general recently released an audit of the General Service Administration (GSA) move from Lotus Notes to Google Apps for 17,000 employee. Unisys is the lead on that aspect of the project; GSA awarded a multi-year contract to Salesforce.com to support Notes migration. The audit found some of GSA's projected cost savings couldn't be verified, and performance measures were unclear or otherwise lacking. And GSA hadn't done an inventory of the applications being moved to the cloud. As a result, the inspector general was "unable to verify whether adequate progress is being made toward the projected savings goals." That's disheartening. Clearly, when considering a migration to the cloud, agencies should include in their roadmap a set of metrics. After all, to show progress, one must measure against valid criteria.


- TT/Bd

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