|
By Mark Henricks
Federal agencies that have moved into cloud computing generally reaped savings of 25 percent to 50 percent, according to a new Brookings Institute study that urges a more active and centralized federal examination of cloud benefits for government agencies.
The potential savings could easily reach into the billions of dollars, according to the report’s author, who cited annual outlays of $20 billion on hardware, software and file servers, out of a total federal IT spend of $76 billion.
In the April 7 study, “Saving Money Through Cloud Computing,” Brookings VP Daniel West noted that government computing services have traditionally been delivered via desktops or laptops running proprietary software. Accessing software, services and data through remote file servers would, in addition to saving money, free users from physical location constraints, enable greater creativity, and, at the executive level, make it easier to optimize capacity by flexibly scaling the level of services up or down.
West examined a number of local and federal cloud initiatives to derive his savings estimates. They include a 2009 move by the City of Los Angeles to switch 30,000 employee e-mail accounts from Novell GroupWise onto Google cloud servers. The contract pricing worked out to $50 per employee per year, and an analysis found that overall savings over five years would be more than $5 million, or nearly 24 percent.
In 2008, West reported, the U.S. State Department Nonproliferation and Disarmament Fund contracted with SalesForce.com for an application that would allow users to obtain detailed departmental budget information using any Internet service anywhere in the world. The $1.4 million cost, including software, staff time, operations, and implementation, was estimated to be 75 percent less than an in-house development.
West noted that a number of factors determine actual savings, including whether the transition is to public or private clouds, privacy and security requirements, whether there is any reduction in the number of file servers, labor savings, and file server storage utilization rates. He also cited several studies that reached other conclusions, including a 2009 McKinsey report that suggested moving to the cloud actually would increase costs 144 percent.
In addition to examining the budgetary factors, West listed five recommendations for federal explorations into cloud computing:
- The government should direct more resources to cloud computing in order to reap efficiencies of scale;
- The General Services Administration should compile data in order to determine potential economies of scale;
- Procurement rules should be clarified to make it easier to buy measured or subscription cloud services;
- Internationally, countries should coordinate laws on cloud computing to encourage the development of standards for privacy, security and training; and
- Lawmakers should require federal agencies to have appropriate privacy and security safeguards.
Reaction to the Brookings report has been mixed. Some commenters hailed it as another rung in the ladder by which large amounts of federal IT spending will be lifted to the cloud. Others point to the lack of conclusive detail in some of West’s analyses. Almost all say that more study is needed. Given the mixed findings of the existing more-or-less objective studies on the topic, along with the claims of vendors and others, that’s one safe bet.
Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register. |
