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vices that you have to build applica- tions actually is reduced in a com- munity cloud.”
Does cloud computing
really save money?
Some participants pointed out, though, that cloud technology is not a panacea and might not always be the best choice.
For some agencies, “it costs four or ve times as much to run apps in the cloud as it does to run them on your own hardware,” one executive said. “We were able to take 40 percent of our apps into the cloud and lower our rack count by 40 percent, but the rest of it, unless someone gives you money to rewrite all the code, you’re screwed.”
Another executive concurred, say-
ing, “We assume it’ll be cheaper to go to the cloud, but is it really? You still have to maintain the staff. You still have to maintain some of the stuff that surrounds that staff. You still now have to pay for the top of the iceberg, which is the compute and the storage, but you don’t see the bottom piece, which is the long-term use of that storage.”
One participant said his agency reduced the number of contractors by moving to the cloud and lowered costs by one-third, but the key is also shifting to software-as-a-service appli- cations. “Going to the cloud is really about exibility, response and avail- ability,” he said.
“I think the true value is going to come when we start building or replacing those applications in at least
platform as a service,” another par- ticipant said. “Just taking everything and moving it over to infrastructure as a service, we’re not really going to save anything. We’ll have agility, but we’re not going to save any money.”
For another executive, the question is more fundamental and comes down to how cloud technology can serve the agency’s mission. “That’s really what the question is: How do you focus on the most important thing? If that’s the cloud, great. If it’s not the cloud, great. It’s the mission that’s got to be rst.”
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