Executive Insight: So you Want to Take Your Agency into the Clouds?

Darrell M. West, a keynote speaker at Digital Government Institute’s September 23 Cloud-Enabled Government Conference, is Vice President and Director of Governance Studies and Founding Director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution and author of the reports "Saving Money Through Cloud Computing" and "Steps to Improve Cloud Computing in the Public Sector”. 

DGI: How expensive is it to move an agency to cloud computing?

DW: It’s generally not expensive because you are outsourcing the personnel costs and software upgrades. That allows you to save a substantial amount of money. You save money because you need fewer IT personnel and you also don’t have to pay for software upgrades because the third party provider includes that in the service. For example, we found cost savings between 25-50 percent when agencies migrate email to the cloud.

DGI: What are the benefits of the cloud?

DW: The biggest benefits are cost savings, being able to scale up as the number of users rise on the website and having access to the latest software upgrades without each user personally having to install new software and pay for the license. More and more agencies are moving to the cloud, and the federal government has made a big push to migrate services to the cloud. But many agencies are adopting a wait and see attitude. They want to see the experiences of other agencies before they rush into full-scale migration.

DGI: What’s the biggest change in adopting the cloud?

DW: The biggest change involves the federal procurement process. In the past, agencies have had to certify new applications agency by agency. Now the federal government is developing a uniform certification process so if an application is judged worthy by one department, it can be used by others. It will streamline the process and speed it up.

DGI: When an agency decides to embrace cloud computing, how fast can they do it?

DW: They can do it very fast right now. The federal government has a website – www.apps.gov.  It lists all of the applications certified by the federal government. If any agency sees something it wants, it can adopt it very quickly. Typically the adoption is agency by agency. If a particular agency wants to migrate its email to the cloud it does so throughout the agency.

DGI: What’s your top recommendation for how an agency should adopt cloud computing?

DW:  It would be to start migrating services to the cloud because that will help them save money and at the same time they get access to the latest features without each employee having to install and upgrade for each feature.

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