About time. There was a great deal of resistance to cloud computing from federal government hinged largely on security and privacy concerns. Now, faced with escalating costs and and ageing IT staff the move into the cloud seem inevitable. We’ve already seen this sort of behaviour in different parts of the world. A couple of easy examples are the cities of Los Angeles and Orlando.
From Network World :
There are 325,000 employees in federal government, 140 departments (all with their own CIO), 124 networks and 144 data centres across the country that he knows of. And 120,000 Wintel and Unix servers use less than 10 per cent of their capacity. “To make matters worse, 40 per cent of IT professionals are eligible for retirement in next five years,” he said. “So we have to leverage the private sector a lot more.”
The Treasury Board of Canada has obtained agreement across departments on the language and definitions for cloud computing and received endorsement for the Government of Canada’s cloud computing roadmap — one that can be validated with countries such as the U.S., the U.K., Australia and New Zealand.
Great news to see them move forward. My only hope being that they do not crash forward without proper due care.
(Image used under CC from dani-santana)
