Why Governments Need to Adopt Cloud Computing

Businesses across the country (and the world) are adopting cloud computing to streamline business and optimize performance and service abilities. Governments, consistently under new pressure to optimize and be efficient, are making the leap, as well, to cloud computing.

For example, The government Cloud-Computing Technology Road Map outlines the policies in place that should work to accelerate Cloud usage among the many sectors of the U.S. government.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is in full support of the outline of “secure and effective adoption of the Cloud-Computing model to reduce costs and improve services,” as quoted off of their website.

While there is certainly an incentive for the government to be more efficient and adaptable, consider how much they stand to save by fully adopting cloud computing. The government is expected to save an estimated seven percent off of the annual I.T. budget. This will occur as the government migrates to the Cloud from on-premise systems.

Accountability, documentation, better decision-making based on fact, protection of the public’s rights, and improvement in operations are all among the benefits seen with Cloud adoption. Savings and efficiency are obvious and well-known up-sides to using the Cloud as well. Visions of triggering innovation in the I.T. sector of the government are in the sights of leaders as they embark upon a brand new age of technology.

If you’re worried about security, don’t be. Wired reports that “The private cloud environments they operate in definitely leverage some of the characteristics of elasticity in those public clouds but they need to be more reliable to handle mission critical workloads. That’s why IDC says that by FY 2014 U.S. Federal government spending on private cloud will be $1.7 billion vs. just $118.3 million on public cloud.”

So how might these benefits be obtained? Amazon Web Services is a well-known provider of GovCloud services which adhere to FedRAMP standards and International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). As an AWS gold member, ChalkLabs can host applications in a secure and reliable Cloud provider. Yet data within a Cloud is useless without a platform such as Pushgraph to analyze and visualize the information at hand. Data can then transform into powerful predictive insights, competitive advantages, and substantial savings.