Cloud save$

The Brookings Governance Studies Program published a report on cost savings the federal government could achieve through cloud computing. Darrell M. West, Governance Studies Director, found that government agencies moving to the cloud have seen 25-50 percent savings, which could translate to billions saved by the federal government as a whole. However, there is a wide variation in estimates of cloud savings. West cites these factors:

• How extensive the migration is and whether the cloud deployment focuses on applications, service delivery, or platform storage
• Reliance on public, hybrid, or private clouds
• The efficiency of capacity utilization, reducing the number of servers
• Level of privacy and security protection
• Extent of labor savings, whether an agency can reduce personnel

While the paper's focus is on the federal sector, it also reports on savings made in e-mail service by the city governments of Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Carlsbad, CA, and 311 management in Miami.


Saving Money Through Cloud Computing, April 7, 2010
      Report (pdf, 14pp/288kB)
      Executive Summary