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:Just typical (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Just typical (Score:3, Insightful)
You're new here arn't you?
Economies of Scale (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Who cares about security? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The joke of Gubbmint technology (Score:3, Insightful)
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. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Economies of Scale (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Who cares about security? (Score:4, Insightful)