Smoothing the path to the cloud

WHAT: “Cloud Buyer's Guide for Government”

WHY: Cloud computing is supposed to be easy. Clients port over their data, select the applications they want, and administrators can spin their capacity up and down depending on demand. Ideally, cloud is cheap, portable, secure, scalable and simple. But in government, nothing is easy. Acquisitions regulations, security demands, legacy system requirements, and good old-fashioned inertia can make a switch to cloud for applications such as email or overall infrastructure appear daunting.

TechAmerica's new buying guide helps agencies develop a business case for moving to the cloud, explains how to make that case to agency executives who might not have a background in IT by stressing the opportunities for innovation, secure and enterprise-wide upgrades that help patch vulnerabilities, price, and performance metrics. The guide also gets into the details on implementation – what to ask for from a service provider to make sure that an agency's custom applications are supported in the cloud.

Verbatim: "Agencies should identify their systems that require updates to computer equipment or that need to acquire new functionalities and then evaluate if the workloads running on those systems are candidates for moving to the cloud, potentially eliminating significant costs associated with the scheduled IT infrastructure improvements."