Let me tell you a story. A very high level organization in the global economy recently came under completely new management. The new management inherited some sorry, dilapidated information technology infrastructure. They hired a new Chief Information Officer to set things straight. In his first week on the job, the new CIO worked 80+ hour weeks and the email servers were down 23% of the time. Over 82% of the computers in the company had reached their end-of-life and most of the desktops still used floppy discs.
Welcome to The White House, three years ago.
The federal government is closing nearly 800 of its 2000 data centers in the next four years, according to the
New York Times. Over four years, the government will swap its sprawl of data centers in favor of cloud computing technology.
The federal CIO, Vivek Kundra, says “Tapping cloud computing services could save the government an additional $5 billion a year, reducing the need for individual government agencies to buy their own software and hardware.” By switching to a cloud-based email solution alone, the General Services Administration and Department of Agriculture have saved $42 million.