Are Local Governments Ready to Leverage the Cloud?

Posted on August 08, 2012

Posted by Gerben Meijer in Industry News 0 Comments

IDC Government Insights released a new study, Best Practices: Some Confidence and Some Hesitation—Surprising Results from Our Government Cloud and Enterprise Architecture Survey, which focused on local, state and federal IT strategies. One of the results that is being highlighted is local goverment’s response to cloud computing.

IDC analyst Shawn McCarthy, who directed the survey, was surprised by the findings. “The biggest likely growth area for cloud is at the state and local level so I was surprised to see local lacking,” McCarthy said in an interview Monday.

The study showed that though government employees are seeing how cloud-based technologies are becoming a need for IT strategies, they are still concerned about how cloud solutions will specifically fit into their organization.

The IDC gave highlights of their other findings in a recent press release :

Across all levels of government 90% anticipate cloud services will have impact on computing infrastructure.

Local government participants were the least optimistic about cloud, with 14.7% saying cloud wasn’t at all important.

Despite the fact that CFOs are often the people who drive their group’s transition to cloud (due to potential cost savings) 60% of chief financial officers are only somewhat familiar with their organization’s cloud strategy.

15.2% of respondents said they would dedicate between 1% and 10% of the IT budget to cloud endeavors.

When it comes to cloud providers, there is a clear preference across all levels of government for large IT vendors versus smaller, specialty providers.

“Survey data indicates that significant progress already has been made for cloud services, but overall progress will only accelerate once several important issues have been addressed,” said McCarthy, ”These issues include lack of knowledge by some participants on the level of funding available to them to spend on cloud solutions as well as the needed enterprise architecture changes that can help agencies move more aggressively into cloud. By focusing on greater outreach efforts to bring all IT employees in line with enterprise cloud plans, government agencies can begin to benefit from cloud computing services.”

Should local goverment start leveraging the cloud? As we’ve said before there is no need for an “all or nothing” move. The best route in this case may be to leverage the cloud for certain branches that are ready to add cloud-based technologies to their IT strategy, and leave others to follow in their footsteps.

What do you think about the government turning to the cloud? Let us know in the comments below!

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