Why the U.S. Government is Moving to Cloud Computing

Grazed from Wired. Author: SUJATHA PEREPA.

It’s no secret that cloud computing is transforming businesses across industries and creating a paradigm shift by delivering hosted services through the internet with unabated cost benefits and business innovation. But while the private sector is building on cloud computing’s myriad benefits, government organizations have also aggressively begun to capitalize on them.

As an IBM solution architect and a trusted advisor to many of our government sector customers, I’ve seen how the financial constraints of the past five years have deeply affected how agencies deploy their solutions. These agencies are pressed to seek optimized business models while measuring their performance and service deliveries more closely — hence their inclination towards shared services…

While cloud deployments are mainly considered to contain costs by sharing services and infrastructures, government agencies have also devised innovative means of ensuring compliance across the enterprise (FedRAMP, for example). They’ve also been able to lower barriers to new business creation. Additionally, cloud adoption is helping governments to improve business flexibility despite their back-end silo systems. The U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy, DOJ, USDA, Department of Education and more have been early cloud adopters, setting the trend and direction for others to follow…

Read more from the source @ http://www.wired.com/insights/2013/09/why-the-u-s-government-is-moving-to-cloud-computing/