The Economics of Federal Cloud Computing Analyzed

jg21 writes "With the federal government about to spend $20B on IT infrastructure, this highly analytical article by two Booz Allen Hamilton associates makes it clear that cloud computing has now received full executive backing and offers clear opportunities for agencies to significantly reduce their growing expenditures for data centers and IT hardware. From the article: 'A few agencies are already moving quickly to explore cloud computing solutions and are even redirecting existing funds to begin implementations... Agencies should identify the aspects of their current IT workload that can be transitioned to the cloud in the near term to yield "early wins" to help build momentum and support for the migration to cloud computing.'"

Comments

Re:Just typical

[DNS-and-BIND]

Is this funny? Or do people just chime in with whatever enters their head but is actually not funny? Serious question.

Re:Just typical

[some_guy_88]

You're new here arn't you?

Economies of Scale

[Anonymous Coward]

Cloud computing provides lower costs due to attaining economies of scale. The federal government certainly has scale to attain any efficiencies that a cloud operator might use to reduce the cost. It is scary to think the government will hand over data and processing to the cloud instead of providing a federally managed private cloud on a secure private network. This reeks of lobbying and special interests. Follow the money.

Re:Economies of Scale

[slim]

It is scary to think the government will hand over data and processing to the cloud instead of providing a federally managed private cloud on a secure private network. This reeks of lobbying and special interests.

The only thing it reeks of, is what the US and UK governments have favoured for the last 20 years or more -- discourage public projects, encourage private sector projects. Don't let the government build a hospital when you can enter into a "Public Private Partnership" instead.

There's plenty of precedence for trusting private companies with government data.

I do agree that a state-owned private cloud would make the most sense - but alas that's not how the US and UK governments have tended to go for a long time.

Who cares about security?

[Whuffo]

Something that isn't often mentioned when discussing cloud computing is a general problem with who has control over your data, where it resides, and what prevents others from accessing it. When you move to the cloud you need to be able to trust the service provider completely. This might not be a problem for unimportant things, but the government has privacy and secrecy obligations that it would not be able to fulfill by handing it sll over to a third party.

Re:Who cares about security?

[teknopurge]

Private clouds? With a private cloud you're two steps away from a Mainframe, where with a mainframe you already have all the isolation, security and time sharing issues solved. With a private cloud, you still have years of break/fix patching to get things working similar to existing technology architectures.(security, delegation, etc.) Where is the value ad? (Serious, no troll)

Re:The joke of Gubbmint technology

[GrpA]

Theoretically, the companies that win these contracts will have it in their best interests not to provide the best services, but whatever cheap services they can while maximizing profits.

That's usually what happens in practice too.

GrpA

Re:Cloud computing offers nothing.

[slim]

Cloud computing offers nothing. And by nothing I mean nothing new.

Of course not. Amazon and Google have been using it for over a decade with great success.

It's nice, though, that the rest of us can now join in cheaply and easily.