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Federal IT Managers: $5.5B Cloud Savings Could Have Been $12B

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Site: computing.fnal.gov

While the federal government saved nearly $5.5 billion annually using cloud computing, federal information technology managers believe that number could have reached $12 billion, CRN reports.

In surveying 108 IT managers and chief information officers, the MeriTalk Cloud Computing Exchange found the government could have saved more if it had pursued more aggressive migrations of on-premise systems to the cloud.

Survey respondents indicated they expect to spend 11 percent of their fiscal 2013 budgets on cloud computing.

This will account for $8.7 billion of their budgets, according to the report.

The survey found 20 percent of organizations’ IT leadership oppose implementing cloud, as do 18 percent of program managers and 17 percent of legal affairs representatives.

Agencies indicated culture and service levels as barriers stopping them from embracing cloud services.

However, a large 85 percent of IT managers said security was their largest concern or obstacle.

MeriTalk Founder Steve O’Keeffe suggested government agencies are overly concerned with security issues and that no survey demonstrates traditional enterprises are necessarily safer than cloud environments.

Seventy percent of respondents said they expect cloud applications to rise in the next two years, which O’Keeffe said is driven by private sector initiatives.

O’Keeffe cites Salesforce.com’s cloud-based marketplace for government agencies, providing training to ready organizations moving to the cloud, and suggests private sector can show the government the way.

The survey found the biggest drivers for federal savings were, in order: data center consolidation, cloud computing, big data and bring-your-own-device.

Government contracting executives sound off about many of these topics in the spring issue of GovConExec magazine, published by Executive Mosaic, the parent company of this website.

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