NYT op-ed linking saving money to adopting cloud computing
Vivek Kundra, formerly the Chief Information Officer in the Obama Administration, argued today in a NYT op-ed that the economic benefits of cloud computing for government agencies will encourage more and more of them to adopt this innovation instead of running their own IT facilities (except in special cases). As I explained here, these economic benefits are driven in large part by the greater energy efficiency of cloud computing facilities, and they are large enough to encourage people to work out the non-trivial security, legal, and other issues with shifting computing to the cloud.
When people think of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where I worked for more than two decades, they often think of huge supercomputers and really smart computer scientists, which are two hallmarks of that institution. LBNL has no shortage of people who know computing, but even that pinnacle of computing innovation decided in the last few years to shift its email, calendar, and other routine computing services to the cloud. That to me says that even very technically sophisticated institutions have good reasons for shifting some of their computing services to the cloud, and those reasons will only become more numerous and compelling as the years progress.
