There is a tremendous amount of IT thought leadership taking place in Washington DC that few people in the private sector are aware of. Case in point, the Brookings Institute hosted a policy forum to discuss the economic benefits of cloud computing. Participants in this event included Federal CIO Vivek Kundra and others.

Darrell M. West, Vice President and Director at the Brookings Institute, presented the findings of an internal research study investigating the savings achieved by various government organizations that adopted cloud computing. Based upon this research, Brookings believes that by moving applications or IT infrastructure to the cloud, government organizations can save between 25% and 50% using cloud resources instead of relying on homegrown IT efforts.

Videos from the event as well as the final report are available at this URL:

http://www.brookings.edu/events/2010/0407_cloud_computing.aspx

My take-aways:

1. Great job by Brookings in basing its savings numbers on case studies rather than models and theory.
2. As I mentioned, all of the good work being done inside the Beltway is often unknown to the rest of the country. Mr. Kundra should explore ways that the feds can do a better job of getting the word out. Relying on government-focused think tanks like Brookings or Washington-based industry groups is not working.
3. Moving IT activities comes down to 2 things: IT skills and supporting the business mission. If your IT skills are weak in a particular area like security, backup/recovery, or network monitoring, find a cloud provider who can do it better than you can. Ditto for applications and IT functions that aren’t core to the organizational mission. Do people working for the City of Los Angeles need e-mail? Absolutely. Does running e-mail applications and servers support the LA government’s mission? Absolutely not.

Related posts:

1. Federal Cloud Computing? Not so Fast!
2. What Types of Organizations are Investing in Cloud Computing?
3. IBM’s Air Force Cloud: A worthwhile project
4. Education Will Take A Leadership Role in Cloud Computing
5. State of Michigan Rolls Out Cloud Computing Services in Easy-to-Consume Bites

Tags: Brookings Institute, City of Los Angeles, cloud, Darrell M. West, Vivek Kundra