Track The Money in the Cloud
The U.S. Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board set history in May as the first U.S. Government wide computing infrastructure to move to cloud services.
Recovery.gov is charged with the responsibility for providing 100% transparency with all of those Stimulus Package dollars designated to give a boost our down economy. A visitor to the site can see where their tax dollars are being spent and where at.
$$BIG Savings$$
By moving Recovery.gov’s web infrastructure to the cloud, the government is saving over $750,000 during its current budgeting cycle and its estimated that even more money will be saved in the future.
Vendors Used
Amazon was selected as the cloud provider for this historic IT project. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) will provide much improvement over government owned systems.
Benefits Gained by the U.S. Government Moving to the Cloud include:
- Efficient Computer Operations
- Improved Security
- Reduced Costs
- Reallocation of scarce human and technological resources to more vital government IT projects.
Smartronix was the company selected to implement the project.
“This is the first federal Website infrastructure to be fully hosted and accredited to operate on the Amazon EC2 and was achieved due to the transparent and collaborative working relationship between Team Smartronix and our outstanding government client.” - John Parris, CEO of Smartronix.
What Else is Gained by the Governments Move to the Cloud?
They main significance of the U.S. governments move to Amazon’s EC2 cloud services is growth of confidence. U.S. government officials and security experts have questioned the governance and security of cloud services. But civilian use of cloud computing is growing exponentially and is the hottest trend in Information Technology. A recent white paper by Lockheed Martin discovered that the U.S. government has huge misperceptions about cloud computing and are not comfortable with letting go of managing the physical aspects of their infrastructure.
The Lockheed Martin white paper states the following:
“Widespread lack of awareness and misunderstanding,” as well as “significant trust and governance questions” remain among government officials, who are far less likely then their civilian peers to know about or be using cloud computing software.
To download the full findings of the Lockheed Martin report visit:
Why the Hesitance?
The same Lockheed report from above found that those in the government who won’t embrace cloud technology suffer from lack of awareness, security and governance of cloud computing; thus stifling the governments usage of the growing technology, which also was found to be more perceptual than anything else.
I am happy of this milestone for the U.S. government. This move will help those in the government evolve and use cloud resources and technology wisely to provide better service for the citizens of this county. The risk involved with selecting Recovery.gov is mild and could only jeopardize the current administrations reputation than National Security or from Financial Loss.
Great work U.S!
References:
Amazon Helps U.S. Government Move To The Cloud
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Cloud-Computing/Amazon-Helps-US-Government-Move-to-the-Cloud-883856
Cloud Computing is Misunderstood by Government
http://www.gsnmagazine.com/node/20625?c=cyber_security
Recovery.gov
http://www.recovery.gov/
Great articles and post Julius. Thank you.
ReplyDeletePablo, I really appreciate your feedback! Thanks for following my blog!
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