Cloud Computing May Save U.S. Government $20 Billion A Year (But There’s More To It Than Just Cost Savings)

November 20, 2013 Off By David

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

A new study suggests that adoption of cloud offerings — particularly Platform as a Service middleware and application development tools — can cut the cost of U.S. government application development costs to the tune of $20.5 billion a year. at least 31%.That’s the takeaway from a new survey of 153 federal IT executives released by MeriTalk, a public-private partnership for advancing government IT. The study, underwritten by Red Hat, Inc., calculates that Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has the potential to reduce federal IT costs by close to one-third.

The federal government is actually a huge producer of software. More than three-quarters of respondents, 77%, say new application development “is vital to their agency’s ability to meet mission objectives.” However, the report’s authors add that “federal IT is fundamentally broken.”…

The General Accounting Office “tells us Uncle Sam spends 70% – $56 billion – of its IT budget on care for legacy systems.” The study found that these processes “move at a glacial pace, translating into higher costs” — the software application development cycle itself takes an average of three and a half years. In addition, 41% of the federal IT managers in the survey say their agencies’ software and applications need to be replaced or upgraded…

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