BasicGov / BLOG

New Federal IT Policies: Adopt New Technologies and Cloud First

This week’s article in the Federal Times summarizes the US Federal government’s Office of Management and Budget six-month timetable for jump-starting new information technology reforms, which include: creating a government wide career track for IT program managers; and  adoption of a “cloud first” policy for IT projects and increased budget flexibility for federal chief information officers. (source: http://www.federaltimes.com/article/20101119/IT03/11190304/1001)

The article outlines Jeffrey Zients, OMB deputy director for management, details from his talk at the Northern Virginia Technology Council where he elaborates on reform and action steps.

Of particular interest to me as a SaaS vendor with cloud computing is the “adopt new technologies policies” which includes a “cloud-first” policies …

• By March, Zients wants agencies to set targets to achieve a 40 percent reduction in the government’s 2,094 data centers by 2015. By April, he wants agencies to implement “cloud-first” policies when considering IT purchases.

More details to follow December 9^th when Federal CIO Vivek Kundra will release a more detailed execution plan.

Federal priorities = state government priorities

As Dan Lohrmann says in his November 21 blog “state governments are usually affected by federal trends, either directly or indirectly. Bottom line, expect these same five areas to show up in a state or local government near you. Similar trends can be seen in the National Association of State CIOs (NASCIO) priority list for the coming year.  (source: http://www.govtech.com/blogs/lohrmann-on-infrastructure/Will-States-Adopt-Federal-112110.html

According to ZDNet’s article published this week, California is on the right path to reduce costs and greenhouse gases when it set out its goals but it needs some help reporting the progress of these goals, more than email consolidation.

The energy reduction goals are to address the fact that the state spends more than $3 billion annually on IT and 40 percent of office energy costs spent on IT.  What is interesting is the order of priorities of the goals: reduce amount of energy used and reduce total data center square footage being the top listed.

Cloud computing is identified as a solution to reducing energy and costs.

Federal government is pushing cloud computing and virtualization to save $1Trillion.  Local governments are also looking to cloud computing to help with IT budget cuts. According to a national survey conducted by the Public Technology Institute and Input “almost half the CIOs reported that they plan to outsource IT operations, including cloud computing, shared services and software as a service” (source: Government Technology). Click to see list of Government agencies around the world that are moving to cloud computing because of the flexibility and operational benefits.