Driving factors towards Clouds :

Three factors driving cloud adoption in government

As cloud computing has become mainstream in government, it's easy to lose perspective on how
much things have changed. Over the past three years, we’ve seen a dramatic shift in cloud
adoption, as more and more governments embrace the technology to operate more cost
effectively, enhance services, and embrace more flexible computing models.

But the road to widespread adoption has had its challenges and barriers to overcome, ranging
from security concerns to cultural changes. Now that agencies involved in healthcare, defense,
and finance—historically slower to adopt new technologies due to the sensitive nature of their
work—are embracing the cloud, I often take a step back to think: What’s changed to arrive at
this point?

I believe there are three factors that have catalyzed cloud’s momentum in government:

 Security: As my colleague Kellie Ann Chainier wrote in a recent blog post, a cloud
solution is only as good as its promise of security and data privacy. In recent years, there
have been great strides made, both in industry and within the public sector, to ensure that
cloud technologies meet appropriate levels of security for government. In the United
States, for example, the federal government launched the FedRAMP program, which
serves as a security clearing house for cloud solutions, helping streamline the security
certification process for federal agencies and speed their adoption of cloud solutions.
Similarly, Microsoft and other companies are offering resources to government
organizations to help them quickly assess the privacy, regulatory compliance, security,
and transparency of cloud services. One example is our Office 365 Trust Center. In
addition, there has been a significant expansion in the various cloud models offered to
government organizations (public, private, hybrid, government-only, etc.), helping meet
the unique needs and risk tolerances of diverse agencies.

 Policy: It’s no coincidence that the leading cloud innovators in government also have
policies in place that promote the technology’s adoption. In the United States, we saw
this with the cloud-first policy, which mandated that agencies must first consider the
cloud when making new IT investments. Similarly, in the United Kingdom, we’ve seen
 changes in procurement with the G-Cloud Initiative, which has enabled government
organizations to more easily procure cloud technologies in support of their missions. 

 Demonstrated ROI: With some government organizations reporting as much as a 50-

percent reduction in IT infrastructure costs by moving to the cloud, among other benefits,
the business model of cloud computing has become increasingly hard for public leaders
to ignore. There was a great blog on this topic from Joe Scalone, who discussed the
impressive savings that many organizations are realizing—including the U.S. Army,
which cut costs by more than $100 million in 2011 by moving to a cloud-based enterprise
email system.