By Teresa Carlson, Vice President, Microsoft Federal
The GSA made big news last week when it announced that federal, state, and local government agencies would be able to purchase infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings through Apps.gov. The news is important because building and maintaining IT infrastructure is expensive! According to a recent article by Nick Hoover (@iweeknick) at InformationWeek, about 20% of the federal government’s $80 billion IT budget goes towards infrastructure costs. That’s a significant chunk of IT spending, and by making IaaS solutions available online, agencies can take advantage of the scalability, elasticity, resource pooling and pay-as-you-go benefits of cloud computing.
The new contract allows top cloud vendors to provide agencies with services like storage, virtual machines and Web hosting. For example, Microsoft has partnered with Insight Public Sector under the new contract to offer agencies Web hosting and data storage through the Windows Azure platform. The goal is to allow government customers to pay only for what they use, scale up when they need capacity, and reduce usage when they don’t. It saves taxpayer dollars because it’s a more efficient way to consume computing resources, and it occurs within a secure environment with over 99.9% uptime. We handle all of the patches and maintenance so that CIOs can focus on the strategic decisions that impact their missions.
What an exciting time to be a part of Federal IT! Apps.gov is such an incredible resource for agencies, and with initiatives like this the GSA continues to facilitate adoption of cloud computing across government.