Federal Cloud Computing: Cloud Readiness Varies Widely Across Agencies

Overall, across all of federal government, cloud acceptance and adoption is expected to quite fast.  A report by CDW found that as of the summer of 2011 already 41 percent of federal government agencies had a written plan in place for adopting and using cloud computing.

According to the CDW report, by 2013, 21 percent of federal agency IT spending is expected to be for cloud computing.  And by 2016, that is expected to jump to 32 percent.

By 2013, federal government agencies estimate that they will have saved 19 percent of their budget dollars by using cloud-basec computing rather than traditional on-site computing.  And the saving is expected to grow to 30 percent by 2016 along with wider adoption of cloud services.  Of existing cloud projects undertaken by federal agencies, the estimate is that 82 percent of those projects have resulted in cost savings.

But when individual groups within the federal government are examined, we find there is a big variance as to readiness of cloud adoption.

The research group Deltek ranked different groups within the federal government based on how likely that particular department or agency is for moving forward with cloud adoption.  Their research found that there is a wide range of readiness among the various groups.  Groups were graded on a scale of one to ten with ten representing the highest degree of readiness.  Deltek refers to this ranking as their Cloud Readiness Level (CRL).

The Department of Transportation, for example, was ranked at 7.5, while the Department of Homeland Security ranked significantly lower at 2.5.

Adoption at the US Department of Defense (DoD) is also expected to be slow.  At the DoD,  spending on the cloud is expected to grow a relatively small 3 percent annually from a value of $676 million in 2011, ultimately reaching $740 million in 2016.  That’s the estimate from research group Frost and Sullivan.  That rate of growth seems relatively modest when viewed in perspective to initiatives within the federal government that make moving to the cloud a priority.  The relatively slower uptake by DoD may be attributed to worry of security, hackers and cyber-attacks.  Much of the DoD information is considered sensitive and moving that data to the cloud may be viewed as unduly risky.

Brad Curran, Frost & Sullivan Senior Research Analyst, said that “Industry standards-based clouds can enable the DoD to permanently eliminate the IT generational gap between legacy and state-of-the-art commercial technology.  In addition, clouds will cut response time and simplify engineering, integration and training while lowering costs and allowing the DoD to commoditize many parts of network security…  Specific cloud programs and contracts will remain rare, but existing programs will continue to be modified to meet the requirement to maximize cloud computing technologies.  This will allow them to be applied to the existing networks till 2016, when the cost and operational benefits will become apparent and upgrades and integration will be faster and cheaper.”