Gov't agencies embrace cloud computing

U.S. government agencies, at first slow to adopt cloud computing, are starting to see the benefits, including low costs and quick deployment, government officials said Wednesday.

Cloud computing services from Salesforce.com helped the U.S. Army revamp its recruiting technology tools in a couple of months and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) Program Support Center create an enterprise-ready requisitioning tool within weeks, officials with the two agencies said at the Software Information Industry Association's conference on cloud computing and SaaS (software as a service) in Washington, D.C.

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Army officials approached Major Larry Dillard about revamping its recruiting technology last September and asked for a new model to be rolled out by the end of the year, said Dillard, program officer for the Army Experience Center. Using Salesforce.com, Dillard was able to get a CRM software package up and running for far less than it would have cost to buy new software, Dillard said.

The pilot program, with 35 users, has been able to make a number of improvements to the CRM package in the past five months, including support for mobile devices, an issue Army recruiters have been struggling with for years, Dillard added. "The power of that is starting to have some converts," he said.

The HHS Program Support Center, which provides support services to several U.S. agencies, has a similar story, said Robert Spector, director of business process improvement there. In late November, an outgoing top official at the agency asked Spector to investigate how to put an IT product request application online, and within a couple of weeks of choosing Salesforce.com "we actually had a working model," he said.

Asked if cloud computing was about to see wide-scale adoption in government, Dillard and Spector offered differing views. The biggest challenge for Dillard was getting buy-in from other Army officials, and he said it will take some time to win converts.

Spector, however, said he sees government agencies under great pressure to consolidate services and cut budgets. Cloud computing "represents the future of our business," he said.

But agencies thinking about cloud computing need to do their homework before diving in, said Ron Ross, director of security at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a standards-setting agency for government. Agencies considering cloud computing contracts need to weigh the benefits, such as productivity increases, with concerns about control over data, security and other issues, he said.

NIST plans to release guidelines for government use of outside cloud computing services later this year, with an eye toward providing flexible guidance, Ross said. "There are great potential benefits for cloud computing and software as a service," he said. "Our job is not to be an impediment to the new paradigm."