It’s no secret that the ongoing economic downturn has had a significant impact on our country. In an effort to stimulate the economy after the housing market, financial services and stock market collapses, the government proceeded to bail out banks, give money to auto companies and spend on major infrastructure projects to provide an economic spark.
The end result? The impact of the stimulus spending has been debated, although a recent report from the White House is very positive. Regardless, the spending has put the country further into debt than before. This enormous national debt and budget deficit has left Washington scrambling, with Republicans and Democrats battling over allowing tax cuts to expire, cutting spending on government programs and other ways to reduce costs.
On Wednesday, the Technology CEO Council, an industry group comprised of seven chief executives from leading technology companies, including EMC, I.B.M. and Intel, met with government leaders and proposed another answer. Just make the government operate more efficiently and less expensively.
According to the Council, the government could save approximately $1 trillion by utilizing new, more efficient technologies. One of those technologies is cloud computing.
As we’ve discussed in previous posts, there are a handful of different ways that cloud computing cuts costs. One of these ways is datacenter consolidation.
Cloud computing enables government agencies and organizations to physically reduce the number of datacenters that they have. These datacenters take up large amounts of real estate and tear through energy. By reducing the number of datacenters, the government can cut down on the amount of physical space that they lease or own, and significantly reduce their recurring utility bills.
Energy and real estate are just some of the recurring costs that cloud computing can help eliminate from the federal IT budget. Cloud computing can significantly reduce the initial hardware costs for provisioning and building datacenters, and effectively future-proof government datacenters. This means that new hardware won’t need to be purchased every time a new technology gets adopted by the government, such as video teleconferencing for telework (which has its own cost savings benefits).
Despite the sheer savings that cloud computing and other new technologies can bring to the government, there are roadblocks to their adoption. Although the government’s chief information officer, Vivek Kundra, has endorsed the adoption of many of these technologies, Congress still needs to pass the funding for them.
Hopefully, the meetings between the Technology CEO Council and government officials, including Lawrence H. Summers, director of the National Economic Council; Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers; Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Fed; and Mr. Zeints of the budget office, will bear fruit and help some of these money saving technologies get adopted. It’s a better solution than cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits, and a lot less painful!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Austan Goolsbee, bail out, Ben Bernanke, budget deficit, cloud computing, Council of Economic Advisers, datacenter, datacenter consolidation, economy, EMC, Federal Reserve, I.B.M., Intel, Lawrence H. Summers, national debt, National Economic Council, Obama Administration, stimulus package, Technology CEO Council, telework, Vivek Kundra | 1 Comment »
