Questioning government's claims of cloud savings

Contributed by Frederic Bourget` (Thursday, May 06, 2010) | Category : Email storage optimization

There is a growing consensus among government officials that cloud computing saves money, but according to one industry analyst, they might be getting ahead of themselves.

John Foley at InformationWeek takes issue with a recent speech given by Federal CIO Vivek Kundra entitled The Economic Gains of Cloud Computing and a report from the Brookings Institution which found that federal agencies can save 25 percent to 50 percent of IT costs by moving to the cloud.

"Not so fast," writes Foley, "some of the case studies being used to demonstrate the cost advantages of cloud computing are outdated, incomplete, or otherwise off the mark."

Foley also pointed to other alternatives to the cloud when it comes to improving storage optimization including "virtualization, thin provisioning, data de-duplication - without having to re-architect the data center as a storage cloud or move to a public cloud service."

Others in the industry have also pointed out issues with the expansion of cloud computing. According to Joe McKendrick of ZDNet, clouds require an increased level of "planning, architecture, integration, security, accountability, and governance - the same, or even more than go into managing on-premise applications and systems."