The Economics of Federal Cloud Computing Analyzed 85
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.'"
Re:Ask the experts: what is cloud computing? (Score:3, Informative)
RMS has recently also described cloud computing as nebulous (I think it's the second question, about 40s in):
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Richard_Stallman_Talk_2009-10-09_part5.ogv [wikimedia.org]
Re:Who cares about security? (Score:4, Informative)
I work on "cloud computing things" and I can tell you that this is, most certainly, discussed at great length... especially with government-level stuff: these are the sorts of issues that are most important.
Private clouds provide a lot of the benefits of centrally managed infrastructure without the drawbacks of having a single, far-away department managing stuff at the operating system level - it can be a major win for large organisations like governments.
Re:Serious Question(s) (Score:3, Informative)
In the case of software-as-a-service (just one example of cloud computing), it's pretty much as you describe.
Does Microsoft say, for example, that the new Office 2012 is entirely cloud-based; no need for apps on your local machine, but they own the server farms to host all of the thousands of Office cloud apps that people are running?
Just substitute Google for Microsoft, and Google Apps for Office 2012, and you've got an exact description of how Google Apps works.