Federal Government Application of the Cloud Computing Application Integration Model

Background

In 2011, the U.S. Chief Information Officer (CIO) Vivek Kundra announced that all federal agencies must evaluate cloud computing options for integrating applications with infrastructure before making any capital investments. A recent study indicated that U.S. Federal Government spending on cloud computing will reach $1.7 billion in 2014 and is likely to exceed $7 billion by 2017 (McCarthy, 2013). While government agencies are not required to adopt cloud computing as their application integration approach, they are required to consider adoption before making capital investments (Kundra, 2011). While some decisions are clear (e.g., not adopting a public cloud infrastructure for classified systems), the federal government is at a distinct disadvantage when evaluating commercial cloud computing options. Because cloud computing architectures were designed originally for improving the profitability of commercial organizations, it becomes difficult to determine whether cloud computing presents an appropriate and valuable model of application integration for government organizations.

This disadvantage may be contributing to slow adoption of cloud computing by government agencies. Federal spending on cloud computing architectures is projected to decline in 2013 and beyond in favor of more limited server consolidation models (McCarthy, 2013, 2013a). While server consolidation is considered a form of cloud computing, the adoption of more limited cloud computing models appears to indicate that the original models of on-demand scalability, self-service, and applications on a “pay-for-play” model is not extensible to Federal Government agencies.