Federal Government is planning to Move to the Cloud. The migration of government IT to a cloud-computing environment will be a gradual process. Revamping the federal computing infrastructure to a more efficient and lower-cost cloud model, such as federal CIO Vivek Kundra, consider it a decade-long transition.

“The cloud is by no means a silver bullet that’s going to solve all the IT problems we have,” Kundra told members of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.  What the cloud does promise, Kundra said, is the potential to significantly cut the portion of the government’s $76 billion IT budget that’s spent on infrastructure. “Unfortunately, the number of data centers in the United States government has gone from 432 to over 1,100 in a decade,” Kundra said. “That’s not sustainable in the long term.”

Kundra’s vision for remaking federal IT in the cloud server model would see agencies both adopt lightweight software applications such as those available from commercial vendors on Apps.gov, and begin to shift their server and data-center infrastructure to a remote, multi-tenant environment.  Federal cloud hosting will save costs and determine the future of federal cloud computing.

“What we’re finding, unfortunately, is that in some agencies server utilization is at 7 percent,” Kundra told the panel, noting that over the last decade, while businesses have been consolidating their IT infrastructure, the number of federal data centers has spiked from 432 to more than 1,100.