Cloud computing for government is not just a cost cutter

Grazed from Information Daily. Author: James Johns.

Before the birth of the electricity generating industry, any enterprise needing power had to build and run private generators. These were inflexible, inelastic and did not scale easily. In the mid 19th Century, centralised generation allowed electricity to be provided as a utility, meaning that consumers only had to pay for what they used. Consumption could be scaled up or down to meet demand without the need for capital expenditure. A century and a half on, this is precisely the emancipating effect that cloud computing is now having on the enterprise.

Organisations no longer need to build, maintain and renew cumbersome IT infrastructure in order to consume as much, or as little computing resource as they need. The cost implications of this model for both public and private sector organisations are clear inasmuch as cloud allows the enterprise to make use of sophisticated business solutions on a “pay as you go” basis with almost no capital costs…

The real challenge for governments is to find ways of exploiting cloud to change the ways that public sector businesses operate in a way that makes the service for the end-user (the citizen) more effective and personalised…

Read more from the source @ http://www.theinformationdaily.com/2013/02/01/cloud-computing-for-government-is-not-just-a-cost-cutter