Across the Federal IT landscape, terms like “cloud”, “cloud computing” and Software as a service (SaaS) are at the center of a seismic shift by the agencies away from building and managing every aspect of their IT infrastructure and services. The potential benefits of cloud computing within the Federal IT landscape are well known, and, the fact is that the role of every CIO across “.Gov” has shifted in a way that makes cloud very difficult to ignore.
The CIOs that lead the Federal government agencies are no longer solely responsible for the management of IT, but now face the added pressure of supporting business growth by reducing costs and driving innovation in a concerted effort to build a strategic advantage for their Agency. One part of the solution is certainly the cloud. Cost savings, elasticity, scalability, “load “bursting”, storage on demand… these are the advertised benefits of cloud computing, and they certainly help make for a solid business case for any Agency to use either third-party services or a virtualized data center.