GSA: Blazing Government’s Path To Cloud
April 2, 2014
Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Wyatt Kash.
GSA’s leap to cloud computing began as a billion-dollar real estate problem. As part of its mandate to provide a range of services to other federal agencies, the General Services Administration owns or leases 354 million square feet of office and warehouse space in 9,600 buildings, and it provides workspaces for more than 1 million federal workers. The problem: Half the time, those people are out in the field or working away from their desks. For a government agency that spends roughly $10 billion annually on leasing and construction costs, officials knew there had to be a smarter approach.
They moved toward a hoteling model, whereby employees check in and out of workspaces. However, that move required GSA to overhaul its IT infrastructure, says acting CIO Sonny Hashmi. Enter cloud computing. Beginning in 2010, when cloud computing was still mostly a vision for federal policy-makers, GSA officials, including Casey Coleman, the CIO at the time, crafted a multiyear strategy to migrate core agency systems to the cloud…
GSA started by migrating 17,000 employees to Google Apps, making it the first federal agency to move basic email and collaboration services entirely into the cloud. GSA officials now expect that migration, completed in July 2011, to save it $15 million over five years…
Read more from the source @ http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/executive-insights-and-innovation/gsa-blazing-governments-path-to-cloud/d/d-id/1141501
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