Welcome!

Cloud Expo Authors: Maureen O'Gara, Pat Romanski, Jeremy Geelan, Nicole Gorman, David Deans

Related Topics: Cloud Expo, Virtualization, GovIT

Cloud Expo: Blog Feed Post

Government Cloud Economics

An excellent economic evaluation of the federal government's push to cloud computing
By Kevin Jackson
Article Rating:
November 8, 2009 11:15 PM EST
Reads:
 8,022

Gwen Morton and Ted Alford have published an EXCELLENT economic evaluation of the federal government's push to cloud computing. Anyone interested in this market should definitely read it, analyse it, and believe it !! The conclusion acknowledges the value of cloud computing, but also offers these practical considerations:

In The Economics of Cloud Computing:

  • It will take, on average, 18-24 months for most agencies to redirect funding to support this transition, given the budget process.
  • Some up-front investment will be required, even for agencies seeking to take advantage of public cloud options.
  • Implementations may take several years, depending on the size of the agency and the complexity of the cloud model it selects (i.e., public, private, or hybrid).
  • It could take as long as 4 years for the accumulated savings from agency investments in cloud computing to offset the initial investment costs; this timeframe could be longer if implementations are improperly planned or inefficiently executed.
  • OMB, GSA, and other organizations, such as National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), should provide timely, well-coordinated support-in the form of necessary standards, guidance, policy decisions, and issue resolution-to ensure agencies have the necessary tools to efficiently plan and carry out migrations to cloud environments. As the length of the migration period increases, the potential economic benefits of the migration decrease.
  • OMB and GSA should seek to identify those agencies with the highest near-term IT costs and expedite their migration to the cloud.
  • To encourage steady progress, OMB should establish a combination of incentives and disincentives; e.g., consider allowing agencies to retain a small percentage of any savings realized from cloud computing for investments in future initiatives. To monitor progress and heighten transparency and accountability, OMB could incorporate cloud-related metrics into the new government-wide IT dashboard.
  • Agencies should consider which of the high-level scenarios described in this article best suits their needs, with the understanding that regardless of scenario chosen, proper planning and efficient execution are critical success factors from an economic perspective.
  • Given the significant impact of scale efficiencies, agencies selecting a private cloud approach should fully explore the potential for interdepartmental and interagency collaboration and investment (consistent with emerging OMB and GSA guidance). This, in effect, leads to the fourth cloud deployment model-the community cloud. A community cloud is a collaboration between private cloud operators to share resources and services.
  • 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.

    • Definitely a must read !!

    Cloud Musings

    ( Thank you. If you enjoyed this article, get free updates by email or RSS - KLJ )

    Follow me at http://Twitter.com/Kevin_Jackson


    Published November 8, 2009 – Reads 8,022
    Copyright © 2009 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
    Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.

    More Stories By Kevin Jackson

    Kevin Jackson is currently Vice President & General Manager Cloud Services at NJVC, one of the largest information technology solutions providers supporting the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). Prior to this position, he served in various senior management positions including VP, Dataline LLC, Director Federal for Sirius Computer Solutions and Worldwide Sales Executive for IBM. His formal education includes MSEE (Computer Engineering), MA National Security & Strategic Studies and a BS Aerospace Engineering. Jackson graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1979 and retired from the US Navy earning specialties in Space Systems Engineering, Airborne Logistics and Airborne Command and Control. He also served with the National Reconnaissance Office, Operational Support Office, providing tactical support to Navy and Marine Corps forces worldwide. Kevin is the founder and author of “Cloud Musings”, a widely followed blog that focuses on the use of cloud computing by the Federal government. He is also the editor and founder of “Government Cloud Computing” electronic magazine, published at Ulitzer.com. google-site-verification: google25c59f8091bf6ea5.html

    Comments (0)

    Share your thoughts on this story.

    Add your comment
    You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

    In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.

    Cloud Expo Breaking News
    By Pat Romanski
    In the face of rapidly increasing amounts of unstructured data, industry is investing heavily to turn machines into services and connect them to analytics engines that will extract an extraordinary amount of value and unleash a productivity revolution for both businesses and consumers. In the health care, transportation and energy sectors alone, the combination of machine diagnostics software and analytics will eliminate as much as $150 billion in waste. In his session at the 12th Internation...
    May. 21, 2013 05:00 AM EDT  Reads: 2,935
    By Jeremy Geelan
    The economics of business are radically changing due to the way in which software and services are being delivered thanks to cloud computing. In his session at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York [10-13 June, 2013], Mike Kavis will cover six reasons for the disruption.
    May. 21, 2013 04:00 AM EDT  Reads: 4,597
    By Pat Romanski
    “Open source has always provided a number of benefits, including easing adoption costs, propagating a better understanding of the technology, and allowing for faster evolution and commercialization of products and services based on it,” noted Terry Woloszyn, Founder & CEO, Leeward Security Ltd., in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “This is clearly evident with the OpenStack and CloudStack,” Woloszyn continued, “and others that have been quickly commercialized as...
    May. 20, 2013 02:41 PM EDT  Reads: 765
    By Jeremy Geelan
    New, "Super-Sized" 4-Day Cloud Computing Bootcamp is a brief introduction to cloud computing carefully created and devised to help you keep up with evolving trends like Big Data, PaaS, APIs, Mobile, Social and Data Analytics. Solutions built around these topics require a sound cloud computing infrastructure to be successful while assisting customers harvest real benefits from this transformational change that is happening in the IT ecosystem.
    May. 20, 2013 10:30 AM EDT  Reads: 931
    By Elizabeth White
    As enterprises deploy private IaaS clouds into production they are reevaluating their future application delivery models. SUSE and WSO2 believe that private PaaS will leverage the automation and scalability of Private IaaS solutions, such as OpenStack-based SUSE Cloud, to deliver the secure, standardized development environments that will make migrating to an agile, serviceoriented delivery model possible. In their session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Chris Haddad, VP of Technology Ev...
    May. 20, 2013 10:07 AM EDT  Reads: 651
    By Liz McMillan
    “Trust is an ongoing journey and sits at the foundation of any vendor relationship – the companies that don’t consistently earn trust won’t be around long,” noted Henrik Rosendahl, Senior VP of Cloud Solutions at Quantum, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “As they do more with cloud, trust will organically grow – maybe it’s just about meeting SLAs or seeing firsthand that data is there when you need it,” Rosendahl continued. Cloud Computing Journal: The move ...
    May. 20, 2013 09:00 AM EDT  Reads: 1,893
    By Jeremy Geelan
    If zettabytes of data exist, why is less than 1% of the world’s data being analyzed today? Seasoned entrepreneur and startup CEO Radhika Subramanian believes that the inability to analyze and gain value from Big Data is that organizations are taking a services-centered approach. As the title of the session implies, Subramanian believes that the data needs to do the talking, not armies of analysts searching and querying databases. Her company has developed high-speed, advanced algorithms to autom...
    May. 20, 2013 08:15 AM EDT  Reads: 3,000
    By Jeremy Geelan
    Our more interconnected planet is accelerating the adoption and convergence of next-generation architectures, in the form of cloud, mobile and instrumented physical assets. Organizations that can effectively balance optimization and innovation, will be in a position to leverage new systems of engagement, out maneuver their peers and achieve desired outcomes. In the Opening Keynote at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York, IBM GM & Next Generation Platform CTO Dr Danny Sabbah will detail the crit...
    May. 20, 2013 08:00 AM EDT  Reads: 2,977
    By Jeremy Geelan
    Cloud enables SMBs to access new, scalable resources – previously only available to enterprises – in flexible and cost-effective ways. McKinsey’s SMB Cloud Report projects the public cloud market to reach $40-$50 billion by 2015, with SMBs comprising 65% of public cloud spending in 2015. But selling cloud to SMBs raises the questions of who, what and how. In this session Manjula Talreja, VP of Cisco’s Global Cloud Business Development Team, will discuss the importance of knowing who SMB...
    May. 20, 2013 08:00 AM EDT  Reads: 1,269
    By Jeremy Geelan
    Analyzing Hadoop jobs and speeding them up is often a tedious and time consuming effort that requires experts. In his upcoming session at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York [10-13 June, 2013], Michael Kopp will be showing how proven APM techniques can be used to speed up Hadoop jobs at the core, without going through tons of log files, beyond just adding more hardware and within minutes instead of hours or days.
    May. 20, 2013 08:00 AM EDT  Reads: 1,767
    MORE »