Government agency chief financial officers (CFOs) often drive their organization’s adoption of and transition to Cloud services and architecture, yet 60% of them are only “somewhat familiar” with their organization’s Cloud strategy, according to a new IDC report.
As anticipated, there’s growing demand for Cloud services and enterprise architecture resources among government agencies, but many agency IT managers “are unsure of their organization’s overall Cloud strategy and the resources available to purchase and implement cloud services,” IDC said.
Many government decision-makers are still at the stage where they’re evaluating the specific benefits and advantages Cloud solutions can offer their organizations, IDC states in its, “Best Practices: Some Confidence and Some Hesitation—Surprising Results from Our Government Cloud and Enterprise Architecture Survey.” The survey is based on responses of more than 400 government IT employees at various levels of the government. About half of participants work at the federal level.
Outreach is required to address government employees’ cloud awareness issues, according to IDC Government Insights. More than one-third of survey respondents said they lacked knowledge of their organization’s strategies and budgets for Cloud services and enterprise architecture.
“Survey data indicates that significant progress already has been made for Cloud services, but overall progress will only accelerate once several important issues have been addressed,” IDC Government Insights research director Shawn McCarthy stated.
“These issues include lack of knowledge by some participants on the level of funding available to them to spend on Cloud solutions as well as the needed enterprise architecture changes that can help agencies move more aggressively into Cloud. By focusing on greater outreach efforts to bring all IT employees in line with enterprise Cloud plans, government agencies can begin to benefit from Cloud computing services.”
Among the key findings included in IDC report:
- Across all levels of government 90% of those surveyed anticipate Cloud services will have an impact on computing infrastructure.
- Local government participants were the least optimistic about Cloud, with 14.7% saying Cloud wasn’t at all important.
- 15.2% of respondents said they would dedicate between 1% and 10% of the IT budget to Cloud endeavors.
- When it comes to Cloud providers, there is a clear preference across all levels of government for large IT vendors versus smaller, specialty providers.
Image courtesy of flickr user JanneM.
