I wrote a recent blog covering a survey from last April of local government’s use of cloud computing in America. A similar intent is being demonstrated by the US Federal Government based on recent statements and events as well as some recent announcements by HP and IBM.

In summary, this intent has been shown by the following;

• This intention was first signalled with the release of apps.gov – a US Government portal to allow different cloud service vendors to market their offerings to the government sector and to provide information on cloud computing
• A ‘cloud first’ policy is being adopted by Federal Government. This means in effect that provided security, reliability and cost-effectiveness criteria are met, Federal agencies should use cloud based services as a default
• This is part of the Obama’s Administration policy to bridge the IT gap between the public and private sectors which is not only focusing on new delivery models such as cloud computing, but also how projects are managed and delivered
• A government goal to reduce the number of it’s data centres by 40% from the current number of 2,100 through the use of “light technologies and shared services”

Considering that the US Government spends $80m each year on IT related expenditure, this could be a huge investment in the Cloud. Recent announcements by HP and IBM demonstrate that this has clear commercial appeal, with HP announcing it’s government cloud lab and IBM’s announcement of the Federal Community cloud comprising of a set of services for government organisations.

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