Implementing Cloud Computing Complexity in the Federal Government

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Implementing Cloud Computing Complexity in the Federal Government

Introduction

The debate and discourse of whether, the US Federal Government should adopt cloud computing or not is over, and the Federal Government is under the first phases of partial and full implementation of cloud computing in various public sector agencies. The present IT (Information Technology) system of the FED government is famous for its low asset utilization. The system's inability to efficiently respond to the demands of duplicative systems, resources, long procurement lead times and hardly manageable working environments were having a drastic impact on the abilities of FED government.

Cloud computing emerged as a technology having the potential to address to all the problems of the federal government. It came with innovative services, high reliability and fast performance for the public sector. Both government and private sectors took part in the implementation of the systems in different agencies of the government. At one side where private sector has been enjoying the facilities of cloud computing for years now and therefore, these sectors have developed a stack of software and hardware infrastructure, application systems, middleware platforms, turnkey applications and software services. This showed significant betterment of services responsiveness, resource utilization, innovation and agility (Velte et al, 2010).

Having the idea of adoption of cloud computing finalized, the studies have shown that, complete implementation of cloud computing in the federal government will cost only $20 billion. Whereas, the cost of present infrastructure and government's spending is $80 billion. Moreover, cloud computing presented an attractive business model for the Federal Government. By the use of cloud computing, federal agencies will be able to pay only for the services they utilize and not the development and procurement of whole IT infrastructure. Not only this, but agencies will also be able to change their requirements of the infrastructure when ever they want.

The Federal Government came up with several options to implement cloud computing including, hybrid, community, public or private combinations. As in private sectors, with the help of cloud computing, technological innovation can be utilized whenever required; the government agencies will also be able to stay up to date in terms of newest IT implementation. The Federal Government has adopted the following strategy (Williams, 2012).

Analysis and consideration of benefits and limitations of cloud computing.

Road mapping, designing a framework and citation of case studies in similar change efforts by different public and private sectors.

Identification of resources required for cloud's implementation.

Identification of the responsibilities and roles of the Federal Government during the change.

After the implementation of cloud computing in different agencies, re-evaluation of the system will be carried out to identify the on ground benefits of cloud computing in the services of Federal Government. The road mapping of cloud computing published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the special publication 500-293, US Government Cloud Computing Technology Roadmap is used as the primary source of information about the change efforts made by Federal Government and other ...