What are the ramifications for procurement practices?
With cloud computing, agencies buy services, not infrastructure. Capital expenses would drop, but recurring costs would rise. This will require agencies to change how they do business, said Bill Vass, president of Sun Microsystems Federal. “Procurement processes need to become more agile and must foster the ability for different parts of the government to share IT costs,” Vass said. Initially, competition might suffer as an unintended consequence of moving to a cloud infrastructure, said John George, senior vice president and CIO of Vangent, an information management company. Today, agencies can use different vendors’ hardware platforms. “With cloud computing, the standards don’t exist to support a similar type of move,” he said.
