GSA stands by cloud migration numbers

The General Services Administration said Oct. 1 its transition from Lotus Notes to the cloud is saving money, despite the questions raised in a recent audit report.

“GSA’s cloud migration has saved the agency more than $2 million dollars to date, and we stand by our early estimate to save at least $15 million over five years,” the agency said in a statement.

The GSA inspector general’s office released an audit Oct. 1, reporting that officials have not properly assessed the headway they’ve made in transitioning GSA’s email and collaborations services to the cloud. Either the performance measures used to track the progress towards each of the project’s goals are unclear, or the project simply lacks real targets. And if targets were set, officials did not adjust them to reflect the current environment. As a result, the IG couldn’t verify whether the GSA’s CIO’ office is making adequate progress towards its projected savings.

Along with checking performance measures, the IG recommended GSA officials prepare an updated project savings justification regarding email and collaboration tools by using actual figures.

In response to the report, GSA said it supports this recommendation and is currently updating the analysis to detail the ongoing savings from the project.

However, GSA isn’t backing down from its actual savings costs.

GSA said savings from the cloud migration continue to grow, with a total savings of $2.9 million so far. As of Oct. 1, GSA has saved $1.84 million in software and licensing and $484,000 in hardware costs. The agency has also saved $485,000 in services and support costs, and $129,000 after staff reductions resulting from the migration.

On an efficiency level, GSA has improved collaboration with the use of shared documents, which has increased in use to nearly 80 percent. GSA said 80 percent of the agency has adopted instant messaging. Overall, internal agency surveys show that 93 percent of the agency say the migration has improve collaboration within GSA.