A survey conducted by Deloitte and the Government Business Council has found that 33 percent of senior-level federal employees believe cloud computing has had no noticeable impact on their agencies’ operations.The “Mastering the Migration: A Candid Survey of Federal Leaders on the State of Cloud Computing” report covered responses from 328 feds who work in 30 civilian and defense agencies, Deloitte and GBC said in a joint release published Wednesday.
Twenty-four percent of respondents said cloud computing had a positive effect on their agencies and six percent of federal employees observed a negative impact after the 2011 release of the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy.
The study also revealed that 40 percent of surveyed employees could not tell whether cloud technology had any impact on their organizations.
“This report validates that support for cloud in federal agencies is growing, but perceptions of its impact vary significantly,” said Doug Bourgeois, managing director of Deloitte’s consulting business.
“Agencies should rethink their core development principles and strategy for migration to the cloud,” Bourgeois added.
The federal government’s “lift-and-shift” approach toward the cloud first policy could have affected the survey’s results, according to the news release.
GBC and Deloitte said the lift-and-shift strategy does not consider how migration will impact information technology architectures, enterprise functionality and end users.
Forty-one percent of respondents describe their agencies’ cloud migration efforts as mixed, problematic or non-existent, the report revealed.
Less than 10 percent of surveyed feds believe their organizations’ cloud migration is successful.
Only 1 in 5 respondents said their agency works to leverage cloud-native applications or pilot early applications built for cloud, the report stated.
