Government and the Cloud

Data Center Knowledgeis reporting on Washington state’s IT operations initiative fueled by $300 million in bonds.

The original proposal has plans to build a 160,000 sqft data center with an additional 160,000 sqft for office space. Most interesting, is the argument that instead of building out a large and expensive new data center, to put these operations into the cloud instead. An intriguing prediction from public sector IT experts is in the next few years that up to 50% of government agencies will migrate most data to the cloud.

The immediate savings to a large organization like Washington State are hard to ignore when your faced with the prospect of footing the bill to build out a brand new data center dedicated to the government. Now that viable alternatives that leverage distributed computing are available, it only makes sense to bring cloud as an option to the table.