Why government’s move to the cloud has gone stagnant
June 7, 2013
Grazed from GCN. Author: Shawn McCarthy.
Today’s accepted wisdom is that the federal government is steadily expanding its use of cloud-based computing. But the reality is a bit different. Although the long-term growth potential for government cloud solutions remains high, we are currently experiencing a significant lull. Many federal agencies will spend less money on cloud solutions during fiscal 2013 than they did in 2012.
The for the slowdown range from sequestration to challenges relating to closing large data centers, to the complexity of standardizing and merging similar applications — especially when it turns out those seemingly similar applications have dissimilar data structures and business rules. According to the Office of Management and Budget, federal spending on software as a service (SaaS) will drop from $764.8 million in fiscal 2012 to $739.8 million in fiscal 2013. Platform as a service (PaaS) spending will drop from $317.3 million to $315.1 million…
Government goes its own way
The bright spot right now for the federal government is infrastructure as a service (IaaS), which should jump 20 percent between this year and 2014, from $ 1.0 billion to over $1.2 billion. This makes government different than most industries. For most commercial firms, SaaS solutions, particularly stand-alone applications, are by far the largest slice of cloud spending…
Read more from the source @ http://gcn.com/articles/2013/06/07/government-move-to-cloud-stagnant.aspx