Government Contracts and the Cloud

First there was the Cloud Computing Initiative, announced last September as a means of slashing the federal government's IT costs as well as reaping the scaleability and flexibility benefits of hosted IT services delivered over the Web. Then there was the mandate contained in the 2011 federal budget that all federal agencies evaluate cloud-computing alternatives in connection with any budget requests for IT investments. Most recently, the U.S. General Services Administration issued a long-anticipated request for quotations from the private sector to provide infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to federal agencies.

Meanwhile Vivek Kundra, the Federal Chief Information Officer appointed by the President last year, has been criss-crossing the country extolling the virtues of cloud computing and the economic gains that it offers to the public sector. Cloud computing, Kundra argues, “offers transformational opportunity to fundamentally reshape how the government operates, engages the public and delivers services.” Kundra's report on the “State of Public Sector Cloud Computing,” issued earlier this year, describes how agencies across the government have already begun shifting to the cloud.