US Fed extracting the juice out of the cloud

If ever there was to be a generic case study sought by enterprises seeking to leverage cloud computing, there can’t be a better one than the US Federal Government whose “Cloud First” policy.

Two key lessons that come out crystal clear from US government’s experiments with cloud computing

1. Move the essentials but non-core items to the cloud. Focus on the low hanging fruit first.

Case in Point 1: US government has saved $40 million a year by moving e-mail services for General Services Administration (GSA) and Dept. of Agriculture.

Case in Point 2: The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board have saved $750,000 by moving to Amazon Web Services’ cloud-computing infrastructure; a move started in May 2010. About 100 data centers nationwide are closed this year  The government has an ultimate goal of shuttering 800 data centers by 2015.

2. Move those apps to the cloud that can take advantage of at least 2-3 basic tenets that cloud computing promises.

Case in Point 1: GSA moved its website to the cloud thus ensuring that website content could be updated in hours instead of days and weeks. This allows the staff to turn to other tasks rather than site maintenance. This move alone is supposed to save $1.7 billion to the US tax payer. The website application took advantage of the cloud’s on-demand ability to scale up/down and also lent itself to a pay-go model for GSA to pay for the support and maintenance of the website.

Technorati Tags: USA,Federal,US Government,Cloud Computing,Case Study,GSA

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Gartner’s 3 predictions for the cloud…

Gartner has released its 2011 predications for cloud computing

1. More than half of an enterprise’s transactions will be done via cloud based infrastructure over the next 4 years - based on a survey of Chief information officers (CIOs).
2. In the Asia-Pacific, around 40 percent of enterprises with more than 1,000 employees will invest in cloud this year.
3. Software as a Service (SaaS) is also projected to grow from 9% of total enterprise applications software spending in 2009 to 14% in 2014. SaaS enterprise application revenues will also more than double during this timeframe, or 15.3% of compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2009 and 2014.

Cloud Buzz - Vol 1 - Edition 1

Cloud Buzz is a quick roundup of interesting happenings in the Cloud space

1.       Microsoft Azure extends beyond PaaS to IaaS through its VMRole offering. This puts its offering on par  with IaaS offerings from Amazon like AWS EC2 – James Staten blogs about it here

2.       SalesForce.com now offers Database as a Service. Database.com provides access to data for an application written in any language, on any platform and to any end-point device – Network Computing talks of it.

3.       Vivek Kundra, CIO of US Federal Government has unveiled 25 point plan to improve efficiency of the US government IT infrastructure. The plan hinges chiefly around the “Cloud First” policy unveiled earlier that insists that the public cloud to realize these efficiencies – Kevin Jackson blogs about it in his Cloud Musings Blog

4.    Estimates by Gartner show that the software as a service (SaaS) market is expected to grow to 18% by 2013 – Cloud Computing Zone